Related papers: Why winning a soccer game is worth 5 points

Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…

We present a framework that gives a deep insight into the link between physical and technical-tactical aspects of soccer and it allows associating physical performance with value generation thanks to a top-down approach. First, we estimate…

In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…

In all competitions where results are based upon an individual's performance the question of whether the outcome is a consequence of skill or luck arises. We explore this question through an analysis of a large dataset of approximately one…

In a generalized tournament, players may have an arbitrary number of matches against each other and the outcome of the games is measured on a cardinal scale with a lower and upper bound. An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of…

Ranking metrics are a family of metrics largely used to evaluate recommender systems. However they typically suffer from the fact the reward is affected by the order in which recommended items are displayed to the user. A classical way to…

The rank of a bimatrix game is defined as the rank of the sum of the payoff matrices of the two players. The rank of a game is known to impact both the most suitable computation methods for determining a solution and the expressive power of…

Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…

Quantitative analysis of soccer players' passing ability focuses on descriptive statistics without considering the players' real contribution to the passing and ball possession strategy of their team. Which player is able to help the…

In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…

The problem of evaluating the performance of soccer players is attracting the interest of many companies and the scientific community, thanks to the availability of massive data capturing all the events generated during a match (e.g.,…

Ranking of agents competing with each other in complex systems may lead to paradoxes according to the pre-chosen different measures. A discussion is presented on such rank-rank, similar or not, correlations based on the case of European…

We propose a new mathematical model for the decision-making of players in football (soccer) and the efficiency of the game style. Our approach is based on $4$-networks, which is a mathematical concept that we introduce. The decision of…

The task of ranking individuals or teams, based on a set of comparisons between pairs, arises in various contexts, including sporting competitions and the analysis of dominance hierarchies among animals and humans. Given data on which…

A common problem in machine learning is to rank a set of n items based on pairwise comparisons. Here ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores, which includes identification of the…

The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…

Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…

The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…

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…

In this paper, we describe an approach to rank sport players based on their efficiency. Although is extremely useful to analyze the performance of team games there is no unanimity on the use of a single index to perform such a ranking. We…