Related papers: Development of an expected possession value model …
The aim of this study was to improve previous zonal approaches to expected possession value (EPV) models in low data availability sports by introducing a Bayesian Mixture Model approach to an EPV model in rugby league. 99,966 observations…
This paper introduces the first Expected Possession Value (EPV) benchmark and a new and improved EPV model for football. Through the introduction of the OJN-Pass-EPV benchmark, we present a novel method to quantitatively assess the quality…
The expected possession value (EPV) of a soccer possession represents the likelihood of a team scoring or receiving the next goal at any time instance. By decomposing the EPV into a series of subcomponents that are estimated separately, we…
Basketball games evolve continuously in space and time as players constantly interact with their teammates, the opposing team, and the ball. However, current analyses of basketball outcomes rely on discretized summaries of the game that…
Estimation of football players' skills is one of the key tasks in sports analytics. This paper introduces multiple extensions to a widely used model, expected possession value (EPV), to address some key challenges such as selection problem.…
Following a penalty in rugby union, teams typically choose between attempting a shot at goal or kicking to touch to pursue a try. We develop an Expected Points (EP) framework that quantifies the value of each option as a function of both…
Despite having the potential to provide significant insights into tactical preparations for future matches, very few studies have considered the spatial trends of team attacking possessions in rugby league. Those which have considered these…
The application of pattern mining algorithms to extract movement patterns from sports big data can improve training specificity by facilitating a more granular evaluation of movement. As there are various pattern mining algorithms, this…
Exploration is critical for deep reinforcement learning in complex environments with high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. To address this problem, recent approaches proposed to leverage intrinsic rewards to improve exploration,…
We study an extension of the classic stochastic multi-armed bandit problem which involves multiple plays and Markovian rewards in the rested bandits setting. In order to tackle this problem we consider an adaptive allocation rule which at…
We propose a bottom-up approach to the study of possession and its outcomes for association football, based on probabilistic finite state automata with transition probabilities described by a Markov process. We show how even a very simple…
Given a set of sequences comprised of time-ordered events, sequential pattern mining is useful to identify frequent subsequences from different sequences or within the same sequence. However, in sport, these techniques cannot determine the…
Transfers play a pivotal role in shaping a football club's success, yet forecasting whether a transfer will succeed remains difficult due to the strong context-dependence of on-field performance. Existing evaluation practices often rely on…
In this paper, we model one-day international cricket games as Markov processes, applying forward and inverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) to develop three novel tools for the game. First, we apply Monte-Carlo learning to fit a nonlinear…
In team-based invasion sports such as soccer and basketball, analytics is important for teams to understand their performance and for audiences to understand matches better. The present work focuses on performing visual analytics to…
In football game analysis, space evaluation is an important issue because it is directly related to the quality of ball passing or player formations. Previous studies have primarily focused on a field division approach wherein a field is…
The expected goal provides a more representative measure of the team and player performance which also suit the low-scoring nature of football instead of score in modern football. The score of a match involves randomness and often may not…
We develop a Markov model of curling matches, parametrised by the probability of winning an end and the probability distribution of scoring ends. In practical applications, these end-winning probabilities can be estimated econometrically,…
I address the difficult challenge of measuring the relative influence of competing basketball game strategies, and I apply my analysis to plays resulting in three-point shots. I use a glut of SportVU player tracking data from over 600 NBA…
Scientifically evaluating soccer players represents a challenging Machine Learning problem. Unfortunately, most existing answers have very opaque algorithm training procedures; relevant data are scarcely accessible and almost impossible to…