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This paper develops a general framework for stochastic modeling of goals and other events in football (soccer) matches. The events are modelled as Cox processes (doubly stochastic Poisson processes) where the event intensities may depend on…
The use of statistical methods in sport analytics has gained a rapidly growing interest over the last decade, and nowadays is common practice. In particular, the interest in understanding and predicting an athlete's performance throughout…
Soccer attracts the attention of many researchers and professionals in the sports industry. Therefore, the incorporation of science into the sport is constantly growing, with increasing investments in performance analysis and sports…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
The field of AI alignment is concerned with AI systems that pursue unintended goals. One commonly studied mechanism by which an unintended goal might arise is specification gaming, in which the designer-provided specification is flawed in a…
Expected points is a value function fundamental to player evaluation and strategic in-game decision-making across sports analytics, particularly in American football. To estimate expected points, football analysts use machine learning…
Defensive organization is critical in soccer, particularly during negative transitions when teams are most vulnerable. The back-four defensive line plays a decisive role in preventing goal-scoring opportunities, yet its collective…
An increasing ubiquity of machine learning (ML) motivates research on algorithms to explain ML models and their predictions -- so-called eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Despite many survey papers and discussions, the goals and…
Goalkeeper (GK) is an expert in soccer and goalkeeping is a complete professional job. In fact, achieving success seems impossible without a reliable GK. His effect in successes and failures is more dominant than other players. The most…
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…
Evaluating a soccer player's performance can be challenging due to the high costs and small margins involved in recruitment decisions. Raw observational statistics further complicate an accurate individual skill assessment as they do not…
In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on the prediction of association football. Due to this, several studies have proposed different types of statistical models to predict the outcome of a football match. However, most existing…
Injuries have a great impact on professional soccer, due to their large influence on team performance and the considerable costs of rehabilitation for players. Existing studies in the literature provide just a preliminary understanding of…
Traditional approaches to measuring visual exploratory behavior in soccer rely on counting visual exploratory actions (VEAs) based on rapid head movements exceeding 125{\deg}/s, but this method suffer from player position bias (i.e., a…
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…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
Action spotting in soccer videos is the task of identifying the specific time when a certain key action of the game occurs. Lately, it has received a large amount of attention and powerful methods have been introduced. Action spotting…
Deep learning models have reached or surpassed human-level performance in the field of medical imaging, especially in disease diagnosis using chest x-rays. However, prior work has found that such classifiers can exhibit biases in the form…
Current implementations of Gradient Boosting Machines are mostly designed for single-target regression tasks and commonly assume independence between responses when used in multivariate settings. As such, these models are not well suited if…
Unsupervised pretraining has driven empirical advances in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), but its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In particular, an influential class of methods, mutual information skill…