Related papers: Ranking Handball Teams from Statistical Strength E…
We propose a Statistically Enhanced Learning (aka. SEL) model to predict handball games. Our Machine Learning model augmented with SEL features outperforms state-of-the-art models with an accuracy beyond 80%. In this work, we show how we…
Handball has received growing interest during the last years, including academic research for many different aspects of the sport. On the other hand modelling the outcome of the game has attracted less interest mainly because of the…
We analyze the results of the German Team Handball Bundesliga for ten seasons in a model-free statistical time series approach. We will show that the home advantage is nearly negligible compared to the total sum of goals. Specific interest…
We propose an original model for inferring team strengths using a Markov Random Field, which can be used to generate historical estimates of the offensive and defensive strengths of a team over time. This model was designed to be applied to…
The progression of a single point in volleyball starts with a serve and then alternates between teams, each team allowed up to three contacts with the ball. Using charted data from the 2022 NCAA Division I women's volleyball season (4,147…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
We present ten different strength-based statistical models that we use to model soccer match outcomes with the aim of producing a new ranking. The models are of four main types: Thurstone-Mosteller, Bradley-Terry, Independent Poisson and…
In this work, we compare several different modeling approaches for count data applied to the scores of handball matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous IHF World Men's Handball…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
Passing during power plays in hockey is a crucial component to move one's team closer to scoring a goal. With the use of women's ice hockey event and tracking data from the elimination round games during the 2022 Winter Olympics, we…
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…
This work presents and evaluates the ranking algorithm that has been used by Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) since 2020. The prominent feature of the FIVB ranking is the use of the probabilistic model, which explicitly…
In this paper, we develop a logistic regression model to estimate the probability that a particular shot in an NHL game will result in a goal, and use the results to evaluate the performance of NHL skaters, goalies, and teams. We weight…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
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…
In this paper, we present a new model for ranking sports teams. Our model uses all scoring data from all games to produce a functional rating by the method of least squares. The functional rating can be interpreted as a teams average point…
This study proposes a statistically grounded framework for real-time win probability evaluation and player assessment in score-based team sports, based on minute-by-minute cumulative box-score data. We introduce a continuous dominance…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
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…