Related papers: Why winning a soccer game is worth 5 points
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…
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…
In the light of the need to achieve a ranking which is understood by all tennis supporters, the ATP ranking is exposed to constant complaints from players and at the same time exposes new players to be benefited with a good tournament to be…
This paper introduces a score-driven rating system, a generalization of the classical Elo rating system that employs the score, i.e. the gradient of the log-likelihood, as the updating mechanism for player and team ratings. The proposed…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…
Ranking a vector of alternatives on the basis of a series of paired comparisons is a relevant topic in many instances. A popular example is ranking contestants in sport tournaments. To this purpose, paired comparison models such as the…
During the last twenty years, a lot of research was conducted on the sport elimination problem: Given a sports league and its remaining matches, we have to decide whether a given team can still possibly win the competition, i.e., place…
In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work…
When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…
The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a number of contexts, such as business, where we may want to rank…
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 paper reviews some axioms of additivity concerning ranking methods used for generalized tournaments with possible missing values and multiple comparisons. It is shown that one of the most natural properties, called consistency, has…
Soccer is a sparse rewarding game: any smart or careless action in critical situations can change the result of the match. Therefore players, coaches, and scouts are all curious about the best action to be performed in critical situations,…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
This paper proposes a multiple-membership generalized linear mixed model for ranking college football teams using only their win/loss records. The model results in an intractable, high-dimensional integral due to the random effects…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
The Probability Ranking Principle states that the document set with the highest values of probability of relevance optimizes information retrieval effectiveness given the probabilities are estimated as accurately as possible. The key point…