Related papers: Why winning a soccer game is worth 5 points
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…
In search and advertisement ranking, it is often required to simultaneously maximize multiple objectives. For example, the objectives can correspond to multiple intents of a search query, or in the context of advertising, they can be…
Mathematical models of street traffic allowing assessment of the importance of their individual segments for the functionality of the street system is considering. Based on methods of cooperative games and the reliability theory the…
The outputs of win probability models are often used to evaluate player actions. However, in some sports, such as the popular esport Counter-Strike, there exist important team-level decisions. For example, at the beginning of each round in…
The Pythagorean formula is one of the most popular ways to measure the true ability of a team. It is very easy to use, estimating a team's winning percentage from the runs they score and allow. This data is readily available on standings…
I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
The success of a football team depends on various individual skills and performances of the selected players as well as how cohesively they perform. We propose a two-stage process for selecting optimal playing eleven of a football team from…
Goals are results of pin-point shots and it is a pivotal decision in soccer when, how and where to shoot. The main contribution of this study is two-fold. At first, after showing that there exists high spatial correlation in the data of…
Feature importance scores are ubiquitous tools for understanding the predictions of machine learning models. However, many popular attribution methods suffer from high instability due to random sampling. Leveraging novel ideas from…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the…
Two-player zero-sum repeated games are well understood. Computing the value of such a game is straightforward. Additionally, if the payoffs are dependent on a random state of the game known to one, both, or neither of the players, the…
This paper discusses match result prediction ability of ATP ranking points, which is official ranking points for men's professional tennis players. The structure of overall ATP World Tour and the ranking point attribution system leads that…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
Game Theory concepts have been successfully applied in a wide variety of domains over the past decade. Sports and games are one of the popular areas of game theory application owing to its merits and benefits in solving complex scenarios.…
Estimating the dependences between random variables, and ranking them accordingly, is a prevalent problem in machine learning. Pursuing frequentist and information-theoretic approaches, we first show that the p-value and the mutual…
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…