Related papers: Revisiting PlayeRank
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 rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have presented challenges in evaluating those models. Existing evaluation methods are either reference-based or preference based, which inevitably need human intervention or introduce…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
In ranking problems, the goal is to learn a ranking function from labeled pairs of input points. In this paper, we consider the related comparison problem, where the label indicates which element of the pair is better, or if there is no…
In basketball and hockey, state-of-the-art player value statistics are often variants of Adjusted Plus-Minus (APM). But APM hasn't had the same impact in soccer, since soccer games are low scoring with a low number of substitutions. In…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
Football is a very result-driven industry, with goals being rarer than in most sports, so having further parameters to judge the performance of teams and individuals is key. Expected Goals (xG) allow further insight than just a scoreline.…
We study repeated multi-player vector-valued games in which a player observes a payoff vector each round and evaluates outcomes through linear scalarizations of those vectors. Different from most prior works, the choice of scalarization is…
In this work, we deal with the problem of rating in sports, where the skills of the players/teams are inferred from the observed outcomes of the games. Our focus is on the online rating algorithms which estimate the skills after each new…
In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes…
In-play football forecasting models have struggled to match the accuracy of betting exchange prices, which aggregate information from many market participants. We close this gap by combining two extensions to a Weibull accelerated failure…
In this work, we extended a stochastic model for football leagues based on the team's potential [R. da Silva et al. Comput. Phys. Commun. \textbf{184} 661--670 (2013)] for making predictions instead of only performing a successful…
Predicting performance outcomes has the potential to transform training approaches, inform coaching strategies, and deepen our understanding of the factors that contribute to athletic success. Traditional non-automated data analysis in…
In this work, we draw attention to a connection between skill-based models of game outcomes and Gaussian process classification models. The Gaussian process perspective enables a) a principled way of dealing with uncertainty and b) rich…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
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…
In this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions…
Competitive balance in a football league is extremely important from the perspective of economic growth of the industry. Many researchers have earlier proposed different measures of competitive balance, which are primarily adapted from the…
In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work…