Related papers: A network-based ranking system for American colleg…
We showcase in this paper the use of some tools from network theory to describe the strategy of football teams. Using passing data made available by FIFA during the 2010 World Cup, we construct for each team a weighted and directed network…
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…
The Football World Cup as world's favorite sporting event is a source of both entertainment and overwhelming amount of data about the games played. In this paper we analyse the available data on football world championships since 1930 until…
For NCAA football, we provide a method for sports bettors to determine if they have a positive expected value bet based on the betting lines available to them and how they believe the game will end. The method we develop modifies…
In this paper we bring a novel approach to the theory of tournament rankings. We combine two different theories that are widely used to establish rankings of populations after a given tournament. First, we use the statistical approach of…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
This paper introduces a novel revealed-preference approach to ranking colleges and professional schools based on applicants' choices and standardized test scores. Unlike traditional rankings that rely on data supplied by institutions or…
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…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
This study explores the relationship between the performance of a football team and the topological parameters of temporal passing networks. To achieve this, we propose a method to identify moments of high and low team performance based on…
Ranking entities such as algorithms, devices, methods, or models based on their performances, while accounting for application-specific preferences, is a challenge. To address this challenge, we establish the foundations of a universal…
Competition is ubiquitous in many complex biological, social, and technological systems, playing an integral role in the evolutionary dynamics of the systems. It is often useful to determine the dominance hierarchy or the rankings of the…
Online competitive games have become increasingly popular. To ensure an exciting and competitive environment, these games routinely attempt to match players with similar skill levels. Matching players is often accomplished through a rating…
Over the past decades, researchers had put lots of effort investigating ranking techniques used to rank query results retrieved during information retrieval, or to rank the recommended products in recommender systems. In this project, we…
We present a physically-inspired model and an efficient algorithm to infer hierarchical rankings of nodes in directed networks. It assigns real-valued ranks to nodes rather than simply ordinal ranks, and it formalizes the assumption that…
We propose a new mathematical model for the decision-making of players in football (soccer) and the efficiency of the game style. Our approach is based on $4$-networks, which is a mathematical concept that we introduce. The decision of…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
A ranking is an ordered sequence of items, in which an item with higher ranking score is more preferred than the items with lower ranking scores. In many information systems, rankings are widely used to represent the preferences over a set…
The task of ranking individuals or teams, based on a set of comparisons between pairs, arises in various contexts, including sporting competitions and the analysis of dominance hierarchies among animals and humans. Given data on which…
Ranking algorithms are pervasive in our increasingly digitized societies, with important real-world applications including recommender systems, search engines, and influencer marketing practices. From a network science perspective,…