Related papers: A paradox of tournament seeding
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
The task of ranking individuals or teams, based on a set of comparisons between pairs, arises in various contexts, including sporting competitions and the analysis of dominance hierarchies among animals and humans. Given data on which…
This note proposes a penalty criterion for assessing correct score forecasting in a soccer match. The penalty is based on hierarchical priorities for such a forecast i.e., i) Win, Draw and Loss exact prediction and ii) normalized Euclidian…
Ranking individuals based on their performance in different coalitions is a problem emerging in various domains (teams sports, scientific evaluation, argumentation, etc.). Often, for practical reasons, the number of comparable coalitions is…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
Ladder tournaments are widely used to rank individuals in real-world organizations and games. Their mathematical properties however are still poorly understood. We formalize the ranking rule generated by a ladder tournament, and we show…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
This paper aims to reduce randomness in football by analysing the role of lineups in final scores using machine learning prediction models we have developed. Football clubs invest millions of dollars on lineups and knowing how individual…
Algorithmic fairness has emerged as a central issue in ML, and it has become standard practice to adjust ML algorithms so that they will satisfy fairness requirements such as Equal Opportunity. In this paper we consider the effects of…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
Any sports competition needs a timetable, specifying when and where teams meet each other. The recent International Timetabling Competition (ITC2021) on sports timetabling showed that, although it is possible to develop general algorithms,…
This article presents a holistic compound Poisson regression model framework to forecast number of corner kicks taken in association football. Corner kick taken events are often decisive in the match outcome and inherently arrive in batch…
The play-offs of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying tournament determine the last four participants in the UEFA European Championship 2020. 16 teams, which have failed to obtain a slot in the qualifying group stage, will be selected and divided…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…
A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes,…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…