Related papers: A physics-based algorithm to perform predictions i…
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
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…
Fantasy football is a billion-dollar industry with millions of participants. Under a fixed budget, managers select squads to maximize future Fantasy Premier League (FPL) points. This study formulates lineup selection as data-driven…
Accurate prediction of FIFA World Cup match outcomes holds significant value for analysts, coaches, bettors, and fans. This paper presents a machine learning framework specifically designed to forecast match winners in FIFA World Cup. By…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
In wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2019-2020 soccer seasons across the world were postponed and eventually made up during the summer months of 2020. Researchers from a variety of disciplines jumped at the opportunity to compare the…
Cricket betting is a multi-billion dollar market. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for models that can predict the outcomes of games and beat the odds provided by bookers. The aim of this study was to investigate to what degree it is…
Traditional interpretations of probability, whether frequentist or subjective, make no reference to the concept of energy. In this paper, we propose that assigning hypothetical energy levels to the outcomes of a random variable can yield…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
Predicting outcomes in sports is important for teams, leagues, bettors, media, and fans. Given the growing amount of player tracking data, sports analytics models are increasingly utilizing spatially-derived features built upon player…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
Cricket, especially the Twenty20 format, has maximum uncertainty, where a single over can completely change the momentum of the game. With millions of people following the Indian Premier League (IPL), developing a model for predicting the…
In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
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…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…