Related papers: What is the most competitive sport?
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 analysis of games and sports as complex systems can give insights into the dynamics of human competition, and has been proven useful in soccer, basketball, and other professional sports. In this paper we present a model for dodgeball, a…
A match played in a sports tournament can be called stakeless if at least one team is indifferent to its outcome because it already has qualified or has been eliminated. Such a game threatens fairness since teams may not exert full effort…
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…
Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the…
The authors propose a parametric model called the arena model for prediction in paired competitions, i.e. paired comparisons with eliminations and bifurcations. The arena model has a number of appealing advantages. First, it predicts the…
We present ten different strength-based statistical models that we use to model soccer match outcomes with the aim of producing a new ranking. The models are of four main types: Thurstone-Mosteller, Bradley-Terry, Independent Poisson and…
Cricket betting is a multi-billion dollar market. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for models that can predict the outcomes of games and beat the odds provided by bookers. The aim of this study was to investigate to what degree it is…
This paper employs a Skellam process to represent real-time betting odds for English Premier League (EPL) soccer games. Given a matrix of market odds on all possible score outcomes, we estimate the expected scoring rates for each team. The…
In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we…
An overwhelming majority of humans are right-handed. Numerous explanations for individual handedness have been proposed, but this population-level handedness remains puzzling. Here we use a minimal mathematical model to explain this…
Estimating win probability is one of the classic modeling tasks of sports analytics. Many widely used win probability estimators use machine learning to fit the relationship between a binary win/loss outcome variable and certain game-state…
Prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes has received much recent attention, especially from the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In the real world setting of outcome prediction, the seminal \'{E}l\H{o}…
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
Forecasting sporting events encapsulate a compelling intellectual endeavor, underscored by the substantial financial activity of an estimated $80 billion wagered in global sports betting during 2022, a trend that grows yearly. Motivated by…
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
We analyze the dynamics of competitions with a large number of players. In our model, n players compete against each other and the winner is decided based on the standings: in each competition, the mth ranked player wins. We solve for the…
Esports has emerged as a popular genre for players as well as spectators, supporting a global entertainment industry. Esports analytics has evolved to address the requirement for data-driven feedback, and is focused on cyber-athlete…
A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…