Related papers: Pitching strategy evaluation via stratified analys…

Major League Baseball (MLB) recently limited pitchers to three pickoff attempts, creating a cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and runner. Each failed attempt adds pressure on the pitcher to avoid using another, and the runner can intensify…

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…

Practitioners are interested in not only the average causal effect of the treatment on the outcome but also the underlying causal mechanism in the presence of an intermediate variable between the treatment and outcome. However, in many…

We propose a simple, statistically principled, and theoretically justified method to improve supervised learning when the training set is not representative, a situation known as covariate shift. We build upon a well-established methodology…

When trying to maximize the adoption of a behavior in a population connected by a social network, it is common to strategize about where in the network to seed the behavior, often with an element of randomness. Selecting seeds uniformly at…

Analysis of the popular expected goals (xG) metric in soccer has determined that a (slightly) smaller number of high-quality attempts will likely yield more goals than a slew of low-quality ones. This observation has driven a change in…

In baseball, a scouting report profiles a player's characteristics and traits, usually intended for use in player valuation. This work presents a first-of-its-kind dataset of almost 10,000 scouting reports for minor league, international,…

We have developed a sophisticated statistical model for predicting the hitting performance of Major League baseball players. The Bayesian paradigm provides a principled method for balancing past performance with crucial covariates, such as…

The propensity score analysis is one of the most widely used methods for studying the causal treatment effect in observational studies. This paper studies treatment effect estimation with the method of matching weights. This method…

Pressing is a fundamental defensive strategy in football, characterized by applying pressure on the ball owning team to regain possession. Despite its significance, existing metrics for measuring pressing often lack precision or…

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…

Propensity scores are often used for stratification of treatment and control groups of subjects in observational data to remove confounding bias when estimating of causal effect of the treatment on an outcome in so-called potential outcome…

In this study, we investigate the interplay between player speed and ball control in soccer. We present a novel pitch control algorithm that quantifies the probability of a player gaining possession at any location on the field. Our model…

This study explores strategic considerations in professional golf's Match Play format, challenging the conventional focus on individual performance. Leveraging PGA Tour data, we investigate the impact of factoring in an adversary's…

We propose a model for recalculating the target score in rain affected matches based on empirical data. During the development of the current stage of the Cricket, different methods have been introduced to recalculate the target scores in…

In this paper we introduce a new methodology to determine an optimal coefficient for a positive finite measure of batting average, strike rate, and bowling average of a player in order to get an optimal score of a team under dynamic…

Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…

It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by…

Randomized trials are often conducted with separate randomizations across multiple sites such as schools, voting districts, or hospitals. These sites can differ in important ways, including the site's implementation, local conditions, and…

Spreading processes represent a very efficient tool to investigate the structural properties of networks and the relative importance of their constituents, and have been widely used to this aim in static networks. Here we consider simple…