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Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) -- due to heavy title and playoff implications -- strides have been made to improve evaluation metrics across statistical categories, going from basic…
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…
In this paper, we consider linear quadratic team problems with an arbitrary number of quadratic constraints in both stochastic and deterministic settings. The team consists of players with different measurements about the state of nature.…
We investigate the problem of creating fast evacuation plans for buildings that are modeled as grid polygons, possibly containing exponentially many cells. We study this problem in two contexts: the ``confluent'' context in which the routes…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
The goal of the classic football-pool problem is to determine how many lottery tickets are to be bought in order to guarantee at least $n-r$ correct guesses out of a sequence of $n$ games played. We study a generalized (second-order)…
2.5 player parity games combine the challenges posed by 2.5 player reachability games and the qualitative analysis of parity games. These two types of problems are best approached with different types of algorithms: strategy improvement…
We show how the separability problem is dual to that of decomposing any given matrix into a conic combination of rank-one partial isometries, thus offering a duality approach different to the positive maps characterization problem. Several…
Brazil's working-time debate is no longer only a choice between keeping the 44-hour week and moving directly to 36 hours. Alternatives around 40 hours, a five-day schedule and phased transitions are also on the table. This policy note asks…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…
Dual decomposition provides a tractable framework for designing algorithms for finding the most probable (MAP) configuration in graphical models. However, for many real-world inference problems, the typical decomposition has a large…
Online games are the most popular form of entertainment among youngsters as well as elders. Recognized as e-Sports, they may become an official part of the Olympic Games by 2020. However, a long waiting time for matchmaking will largely…
Any sports competition needs a timetable, specifying when and where teams meet each other. The recent International Timetabling Competition (ITC2021) on sports timetabling showed that, although it is possible to develop general algorithms,…
Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the…
The remarkable attention which fair clustering has received in the last few years has resulted in a significant number of different notions of fairness. Despite the fact that these notions are well-justified, they are often motivated and…
UEFA declares that it is committed to respecting the fundamental values of sports. However, the qualification rules of the post-2024 UEFA Champions League are shown to be unfair: a game with misaligned incentives was narrowly avoided in the…
A sport tournament problem is considered the Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP). One interesting type is the mirrored Traveling Tournament Problem (mTTP). The objective of the problem is to minimize either the total number of traveling or…
The restricted max-min fair allocation problem seeks an allocation of resources to players that maximizes the minimum total value obtained by any player. It is NP-hard to approximate the problem to a ratio less than 2. Comparing the current…
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes, with particular emphasis placed on this area by the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In this…