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

We introduce a Bayesian mean-value approach for ranking all college football teams using only win-loss data. This approach is unique in that the prior distribution necessary to handle undefeated and winless teams is calculated…

Determining how close a winner of an election is to becoming a loser, or distinguishing between different possible winners of an election, are major problems in computational social choice. We tackle these problems for so-called weighted…

A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…

Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each…

PageRank is a Web page ranking technique that has been a fundamental ingredient in the development and success of the Google search engine. The method is still one of the many signals that Google uses to determine which pages are most…

This paper considers the problem of inference after ranking. In our setting, we are interested in any population whose rank according to some random quantity, such as an estimated treatment effect, a measure of value-added, or benefit (net…

Modelling football outcomes has gained increasing attention, in large part due to the potential for making substantial profits. Despite the strong connection existing between football models and the bookmakers' betting odds, no authors have…

We explore the advantages of representing international football results as a directed network in order to give each team a rank. Two network-based models --- Static and Dynamic --- are constructed and compared with the FIFA Rankings. The…

Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…

Tournament solutions are frequently used to select winners from a set of alternatives based on pairwise comparisons between alternatives. Prior work has shown that several common tournament solutions tend to select large winner sets and…

This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…

Score matching is a recently developed parameter learning method that is particularly effective to complicated high dimensional density models with intractable partition functions. In this paper, we study two issues that have not been…

Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…

A knowledgeable observer of a game of football (soccer) can make a subjective evaluation of the quality of passes made between players during the game. We investigate the problem of producing an automated system to make the same evaluation…

We present a physically-inspired model and an efficient algorithm to infer hierarchical rankings of nodes in directed networks. It assigns real-valued ranks to nodes rather than simply ordinal ranks, and it formalizes the assumption that…

We investigate the properties of the James function, associated with Bill James's so-called "log5 method," which assigns a probability to the result of a game between two teams based on their respective winning percentages. We also…

In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…

This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…