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The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most…
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes, with particular emphasis placed on this area by the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In this…
One of the key problems in the field of soccer analytics is predicting how a player performance changes when transitioning from one league to another. One potential solution to address this issue lies in the evaluation of the respective…
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 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…
In the domain of the Soccer simulation 2D league of the RoboCup project, appropriate player positioning against a given opponent team is an important factor of soccer team performance. This work proposes a model which decides the strategy…
This paper introduces the first Expected Possession Value (EPV) benchmark and a new and improved EPV model for football. Through the introduction of the OJN-Pass-EPV benchmark, we present a novel method to quantitatively assess the quality…
The traveling tournament problem is a well-known benchmark problem of the sports scheduling. We propose an approximation algorithm for the traveling tournament problem with the constraints such that both the number of consecutive home games…
This study analyzes pass networks in football (soccer) using a stochastic model known as the P\'olya urn. By focusing on preferential selection, it theoretically demonstrates that the time evolution of networks can be characterized by a…
In this work, we compare three different modeling approaches for the scores of soccer matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002 - 2014: Poisson regression models,…
We summarise the results of RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation League in 2016 (Leipzig), including the main competition and the evaluation round. The evaluation round held in Leipzig confirmed the strength of RoboCup-2015 champion (WrightEagle,…
The availability of tracking data in football presents unique opportunities for analyzing team shape and player roles, but leveraging it effectively remains challenging. This difficulty arises from the significant overlap in player…
The paper presents a plus-minus rating for use in association football (soccer). We first describe the standard plus-minus methodology as used in basketball and ice-hockey and then adapt it for use in soccer. The usual goal-differential…
Converting betting odds into accurate outcome probabilities is a fundamental challenge in order to use betting odds as a benchmark for sports forecasting and market efficiency analysis. In this study, we propose two methods to overcome the…
In wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2019-2020 soccer seasons across the world were postponed and eventually made up during the summer months of 2020. Researchers from a variety of disciplines jumped at the opportunity to compare the…
Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
One of the most serious violations of fairness in sports is when a team has clear incentives to lose a match, which hurt a third, innocent team. This is shown to be not only a theoretical possibility as the recently identified incentive…