Related papers: A Unified Server Quality Metric for Tennis
We present a theoretical analysis of the Elo rating system, a popular method for ranking skills of players in an online setting. In particular, we study Elo under the Bradley--Terry--Luce model and, using techniques from Markov chain…
The Elo rating system is widely adopted to evaluate the skills of (chess) game and sports players. Recently it has been also integrated into machine learning algorithms in evaluating the performance of computerised AI agents. However, an…
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are…
This article discusses in detail the rating system that won the kaggle competition "Chess Ratings: Elo vs the rest of the world". The competition provided a historical dataset of outcomes for chess games, and aimed to discover whether novel…
Serves, especially first serves, are very important in professional tennis. Servers choose their serve directions strategically to maximize their winning chances while trying to be unpredictable. On the other hand, returners try to predict…
Tennis is a popular sport worldwide, boasting millions of fans and numerous national and international tournaments. Like many sports, tennis has benefitted from the popularity of rigorous record-keeping of game and player information, as…
In professional tennis, it is often acknowledged that the server has an initial advantage. Indeed, the majority of points are won by the server, making the serve one of the most important elements in this sport. In this paper, we focus on…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
Marking and feedback are essential features of teaching and learning, across the overwhelming majority of educational settings and contexts. However, it can take a great deal of time and effort for teachers to mark assessments, and to…
We propose a novel ranking model that combines the Bradley-Terry-Luce probability model with a nonnegative matrix factorization framework to model and uncover the presence of latent variables that influence the performance of top tennis…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…
Rating systems play a crucial role in evaluating player skill across competitive environments. The Elo rating system, originally designed for deterministic and information-complete games such as chess, has been widely adopted and modified…
In this work we develop a new algorithm for rating of teams (or players) in one-on-one games by exploiting the observed difference of the game-points (such as goals), also known as a margin of victory (MOV). Our objective is to obtain the…
This work reconciles two perspectives on the Elo ranking that coexist in the literature: the practitioner's view as a heuristic feedback rule, and the statistician's view as online maximum likelihood estimation via stochastic gradient…
We establish a general formula for the distribution of the score in table tennis. We use this formula to derive the probability distribution (and hence the expectation and variance) of the number of rallies necessary to achieve any given…
Understanding the dynamics of momentum and game fluctuation in tennis matches is cru-cial for predicting match outcomes and enhancing player performance. In this study, we present a comprehensive analysis of these factors using a dataset…
With the aid of mathematical modelling (basic tool is the random walk with absorbing barriers) we derive subsequent formulas to study the effect of different versions of possible rules. For different rules the probability of winning a game,…
We show that information on the first server influences the expected total number of games and margin in a tennis match under the standard assumption that each player's serve point win probability remains constant, and identify the exact…
Assessing the skill level of players to predict the outcome and to rank the players in a longer series of games is of critical importance for tournament play. Besides weaknesses, like an observed continuous inflation, through a steadily…
Tennis strategy optimization is a challenging sequential decision-making problem involving hierarchical scoring, stochastic outcomes, long-horizon credit assignment, physical fatigue, and adaptation to opponent skill. I present a…