Related papers: A general framework to quantify the event importan…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
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…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
Foundation models are used for many real-world applications involving language generation from temporally-ordered multimodal events. In this work, we study the ability of models to identify the most important sub-events in a video, which is…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
We introduce a new unified framework for modelling both decision problems and finite games based on quantifiers and selection functions. We show that the canonical utility maximisation is one special case of a quantifier and that our more…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
Formula One race weekends are structured around multiple sessions: practices, qualifying, and the Grand Prix itself, each contributing to final race performance. This study analyzes nearly two decades of races, encompassing 7,800…
The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of machine learning-driven technologies have underscored the practical and ethical need for creating interpretable artificial intelligence systems. Feature importance, a method that assigns…
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…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
Information extracted from social media streams has been leveraged to forecast the outcome of a large number of real-world events, from political elections to stock market fluctuations. An increasing amount of studies demonstrates how the…
Multiwinner voting captures a wide variety of settings, from parliamentary elections in democratic systems to product placement in online shopping platforms. There is a large body of work dealing with axiomatic characterizations,…
The authors propose a parametric model called the arena model for prediction in paired competitions, i.e. paired comparisons with eliminations and bifurcations. The arena model has a number of appealing advantages. First, it predicts the…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
We propose a game-theoretic framework that incorporates both incomplete information and general ambiguity attitudes on factors external to all players. Our starting point is players' preferences on payoff-distribution vectors, essentially…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…