Related papers: A probabilistic match classification model for spo…
We introduce a "high probability" framework for repeated games with incomplete information. In our non-equilibrium setting, players aim to guarantee a certain payoff with high probability, rather than in expected value. We provide a high…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
When a player withdraws mid-tournament from a round-robin chess event, organizers face a fundamental problem: how should scores be assigned for games that were never played? Current FIDE guidelines specify annulment if withdrawal occurs…
We present a robust framework with computational algorithms to support decision makers in sequential games. Our framework includes methods to solve games with complete information, assess the robustness of such solutions and, finally,…
Every sport needs rules. Tournament design refers to the rules that determine how a tournament, a series of games between a number of competitors, is organized. This study aims to provide an overview of the tournament design literature from…
Single-elimination tournaments are the standard paradigm both for the main tennis professional associations. Schedules are generated by allocating first seeded and then unseeded players with seeds prevented from encountering each other…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…
The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the…
We explore a new way to evaluate generative models using insights from evaluation of competitive games between human players. We show experimentally that tournaments between generators and discriminators provide an effective way to evaluate…
In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…
In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different…
Sports data has become widely available in the recent past. With the improvement of machine learning techniques, there have been attempts to use sports data to analyze not only the outcome of individual games but also to improve insights…
Imprecise probability is concerned with uncertainty about which probability distributions to use. It has applications in robust statistics and machine learning. We look at programming language models for imprecise probability. Our…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
In 2000 Allen Schwenk, using a well-known mathematical model of matchplay tournaments in which the probability of one player beating another in a single match is fixed for each pair of players, showed that the classical single-elimination,…
Constructing a suitable schedule for sports competitions is a crucial issue in sports scheduling. The round-robin tournament is a competition adopted in many professional sports. For most round-robin tournaments, it is considered…
Incomplete cooperative games generalise the classical model of cooperative games by omitting the values of some of the coalitions. This allows to incorporate uncertainty into the model and study the underlying games as well as possible…
Classifiers are often tested on relatively small data sets, which should lead to uncertain performance metrics. Nevertheless, these metrics are usually taken at face value. We present an approach to quantify the uncertainty of…
Crucial to an Evolutionary Algorithm's performance is its selection scheme. We mathematically investigate the relation between polynomial rank and probabilistic tournament methods which are (respectively) generalisations of the popular…