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Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
In sports betting it is easier to predict the winner of a game match than the team that covers the bet. Since, a winner team might not cover a bet. This study focuses on the relation of the variable win to the betting variable cover the…
Unconscious bias has been shown to influence how we assess our peers, with consequences for hiring, promotions and admissions. In this work, we focus on affinity bias, the component of unconscious bias which leads us to prefer people who…
This paper aims to revisit and expand upon previous work on the "hot hand" phenomenon in basketball, specifically in the NBA. Using larger, modern data sets, we test streakiness of shooting patterns and the presence of hot hand behavior in…
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 need to address representation biases and sentencing disparities in legal case data has long been recognized. Here, we study the problem of identifying and measuring biases in large-scale legal case data from an algorithmic fairness…
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the home team bunting in extra innings of Major League Baseball games when the game is tied in the bottom of the inning. Using methods rooted in causal inference, we show that teams choose…
The causes underlying unfair decision making are complex, being internalised in different ways by decision makers, other actors dealing with data and models, and ultimately by the individuals being affected by these decisions. One frequent…
Intergroup contact has long been considered as an effective strategy to reduce prejudice between groups. However, recent studies suggest that exposure to opposing groups in online platforms can exacerbate polarization. To further understand…
For some time, point-differential has been thought to be a better predictor for future NBA success than pure win-loss record. Most ranking and team performance predictions rely largely on point-differential, often with some normalizations…
A robust body of evidence demonstrates the adverse effects of implicit bias in various contexts--from hiring to health care. The Rooney Rule is an intervention developed to counter implicit bias and has been implemented in the private and…
The "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm, using Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated evaluators, is pivotal to LLM development, offering scalable feedback for complex tasks. However, the reliability of these judges is compromised by various…
We develop a machine learning approach to represent and analyze the underlying spatial structure that governs shot selection among professional basketball players in the NBA. Typically, NBA players are discussed and compared in an…
During the last few sports seasons a lot of discussion has been generated for the several, high-profile, "comebacks" that were observed in almost all sports. The Cavaliers won the championship after being down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA finals'…
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 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.…
Recent years have seen many insights on deep learning optimisation being brought forward by finding implicit regularisation effects of commonly used gradient-based optimisers. Understanding implicit regularisation can not only shed light on…
AI systems are increasingly deployed in both public and private sectors to independently make complicated decisions with far-reaching impact on individuals and the society. However, many AI algorithms are biased in the collection or…
The debate surrounding the hot hand in the NBA has been ongoing for many years. However, many of the previous works on this theme has focused on only the very next sequential shot attempt, often on very select players. This work looks in…
Automated decision systems are increasingly used for consequential decision making -- for a variety of reasons. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque models, which do not (or hardly) allow for understanding how or why a given…