Related papers: A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA Wor…
In this work, three fundamentally different machine learning models are combined to create a new, joint model for forecasting the UEFA EURO 2024. Therefore, a generalized linear model, a random forest model, and a extreme gradient boosting…
Round robin tournaments are omnipresent in sport competitions and beyond. We propose two new integer programming formulations for scheduling a round robin tournament, one of which we call the matching formulation. We analytically compare…
We focus on the problem of finding an optimal strategy for a team of two players that faces an opponent in an imperfect-information zero-sum extensive-form game. Team members are not allowed to communicate during play but can coordinate…
Accurate prediction of FIFA World Cup match outcomes holds significant value for analysts, coaches, bettors, and fans. This paper presents a machine learning framework specifically designed to forecast match winners in FIFA World Cup. By…
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…
The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a hard but interesting sports scheduling problem inspired by Major League Baseball, which is to design a double round-robin schedule such that each pair of teams plays one game in each other's home…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
When $n$ teams play in a football league with home and away matches against every opponent there are $M = n \cdot (n-1)$ matches. There are 3 possible match results: a victory is awarded 3 points, a draw 1 point and 0 points for a defeat.…
We consider a classic many-to-one matching setting, where participants need to be assigned to teams based on the preferences of both sides. Unlike most of the matching literature, we aim to provide fairness not only to participants, but…
The traveling tournament problem is a well-known benchmark problem of the sports scheduling. We propose an approximation algorithm for the traveling tournament problem with the constraints such that both the number of consecutive home games…
We study the problem of scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments. We consider three measures of a schedule that concern the quality and fairness of a tournament. We show that the schedule generated by the well-known "circle design"…
The assignment of personnel to teams is a fundamental and ubiquitous managerial function, typically involving several objectives and a variety of idiosyncratic practical constraints. Despite the prevalence of this task in practice, the…
The break minimization problem is a fundamental problem in sports scheduling. Recently, its quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulation has been proposed, which has gained much interest with the rapidly growing field of…
This study addresses a central tactical dilemma for football coaches: whether to employ a defensive strategy, colloquially known as "parking the bus", or a more offensive one. Using an advanced Double Machine Learning (DML) framework, this…
In many professional sports leagues, teams from opposing leagues/conferences compete against one another, playing inter-league games. This is an example of a bipartite tournament. In this paper, we consider the problem of reducing the total…
In some domestic professional sports leagues, the home stadiums are located in cities connected by a common train line running in one direction. For these instances, we can incorporate this geographical information to determine optimal or…
We consider the unconstrained traveling tournament problem, a sports timetabling problem that minimizes traveling of teams. Since its introduction about 20 years ago, most research was devoted to modeling and reformulation approaches. In…
For a two-player imperfect-information extensive-form game (IIEFG) with $K$ time steps and a player action space of size $U$, the game tree complexity is $U^{2K}$, causing existing IIEFG solvers to struggle with large or infinite $(U,K)$,…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…