Related papers: Improving Algorithms for Fantasy Basketball
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…
Fantasy sports allow fans to manage a team of their favorite athletes and compete with friends. The fantasy platform aligns the real-world statistical performance of athletes to fantasy scoring and has steadily risen in popularity to an…
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), teams must make choices about which players to acquire, how much to pay them, and other decisions that are fundamentally dependent on player effectiveness. Thus, there is great interest in…
Identifying combinations of players (that is, lineups) in basketball - and other sports - that perform well when they play together is one of the most important tasks in sports analytics. One of the main challenges associated with this task…
Stochastic optimization algorithms have been successfully applied in several domains to find optimal solutions. Because of the ever-growing complexity of the integrated systems, novel stochastic algorithms are being proposed, which makes…
The underlying physics of basketball shooting seems to be a straightforward example of the Newtonian mechanics that can easily be traced by numerical methods. However, a human basketball player does not make use of all the possible…
In team sports, traditional ranking statistics do not allow for the simultaneous evaluation of both individuals and combinations of players. Metrics for individual player rankings often fail to include the interaction effects between groups…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…
The expected goal provides a more representative measure of the team and player performance which also suit the low-scoring nature of football instead of score in modern football. The score of a match involves randomness and often may not…
This book chapter reviews some of the major principles associated with optimal strategy in basketball. In particular, we consider the principles of allocative efficiency (optimal allocation of shots between offensive options), dynamic…
In the domain of Sport Analytics, Global Positioning Systems devices are intensively used as they permit to retrieve players' movements. Team sports' managers and coaches are interested on the relation between players' patterns of movements…
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…
Contract bridge occupies nowadays a position of great prestige being, together with chess, the only mind games officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee. In the present paper an innovative method for assessing the total…
We consider the problem of selecting a portfolio of entries of fixed cardinality for contests with top-heavy payoff structures, i.e. most of the winnings go to the top-ranked entries. This framework is general and can be used to model a…
This paper uses category theory to develop an entirely new approach to approximate game theory. Game theory is the study of how different agents within a multi-agent system take decisions. At its core, game theory asks what an optimal…
In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot…
In this paper, we propose two novel basketball metrics: ``expected points'' for team-based comparisons and ``expected points above average (EPAA)'' as a player-evaluation tool. Established within the Bayesian hierarchical model framework,…
Evaluating sports players based on their performance shares core challenges with evaluating healthcare providers based on patient outcomes. Drawing on recent advances in healthcare provider profiling, we cast sports player evaluation within…
Traditional NBA player evaluation metrics are based on scoring differential or some pace-adjusted linear combination of box score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc. These measures treat performances with the outcome of the game…
While games have been used extensively as milestones to evaluate game-playing AI, there exists no standardised framework for reporting the obtained observations. As a result, it remains difficult to draw general conclusions about the…