Related papers: FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward
We designed a multilayer perceptron neural network to predict the price of a football (soccer) player using data on more than 15,000 players from the football simulation video game FIFA 2017. The network was optimized by experimenting with…
This work reconciles two perspectives on the Elo ranking that coexist in the literature: the practitioner's view as a heuristic feedback rule, and the statistician's view as online maximum likelihood estimation via stochastic gradient…
Machine learning models have become increasingly popular for predicting the results of soccer matches, however, the lack of publicly-available benchmark datasets has made model evaluation challenging. The 2023 Soccer Prediction Challenge…
The group stage of a sports tournament is often made more appealing by introducing additional constraints in the group draw that promote an attractive and balanced group composition. For example, the number of intra-regional group matches…
We propose an approach for the analysis and prediction of a football championship. It is based on Poisson regression models that include the Elo points of the teams as covariates and incorporates differences of team-specific effects. These…
We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…
Ranking of agents competing with each other in complex systems may lead to paradoxes according to the pre-chosen different measures. A discussion is presented on such rank-rank, similar or not, correlations based on the case of European…
The purpose of this research is to create a machine learning-based smart coaching approach for football that can replace manual analysis with real-time feedback for trainers. In-depth analysis of football player data by humans is…
Computing the probability of a formula given the probabilities or weights associated with other formulas is a natural extension of logical inference to the probabilistic setting. Surprisingly, this problem has received little attention in…
Several sports tournaments contain a round-robin group stage where the teams are assigned to groups subject to some constraints. Hence, the organisers usually use a computer-assisted random draw to avoid any dead end, a situation when the…
We consider the problem of maximizing an unknown function over a compact and convex set using as few observations as possible. We observe that the optimization of the function essentially relies on learning the induced bipartite ranking…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
Modelling football outcomes has gained increasing attention, in large part due to the potential for making substantial profits. Despite the strong connection existing between football models and the bookmakers' betting odds, no authors have…
This work is concerned with the rating of players/teams in face-to-face games with three possible outcomes: loss, win, and draw. This is one of the fundamental problems in sport analytics, where the very simple and popular, non-trivial…
In the last years, scientific and industrial research has experienced a growing interest in acquiring large annotated data sets to train artificial intelligence algorithms for tackling problems in different domains. In this context, we have…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
Composing a team of professional players is among the most crucial decisions in association football. Nevertheless, transfer market decisions are often based on myopic objectives and are questionable from a financial point of view. This…
A scoring rule is a function of a probabilistic forecast and a corresponding outcome that is used to evaluate forecast performance. A wide range of scoring rules have been defined over time and there is some debate as to which are the most…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
A knowledgeable observer of a game of football (soccer) can make a subjective evaluation of the quality of passes made between players during the game. We investigate the problem of producing an automated system to make the same evaluation…