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On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
Stochastic optimization algorithms have been successfully applied in several domains to find optimal solutions. Because of the ever-growing complexity of the integrated systems, novel stochastic algorithms are being proposed, which makes…
In this article, we study the dynamics of marking in football matches. To do this, we surveyed and analyzed a database containing the trajectories of players from both teams on the field of play during three professional games. We describe…
There is enduring interest in disentangling the effects of skill and luck in sport. A key issue in Formula 1 is distinguishing between car-level and driver-level effects. Four elite teams currently dominate Formula 1 and have won every…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
We present here two examples of stochastic modelings of social phenomena. The first topic is pedestrian counter flow. Two groups of model pedestrians move in opposite directions and create congestions. It will be shown that this congestion…
In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…
Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…
In sports, there is a constant effort to improve metrics which assess player ability, but there has been almost no effort to quantify and compare existing metrics. Any individual making a management, coaching, or gambling decision is…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
We propose a statistical framework for quantifying the importance of single events that do not provide intermediate rewards but offer implicit incentives through the reward structure at the end of a multi-event contest. Applying the…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
Sports betting markets have grown very rapidly recently, with the total European gambling market worth 98.6 billion euro in 2019. Considering a high-resolution (1 Hz) data set provided by a large European bookmaker, we investigate the…
Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
We study the two-sided stable matching problem with one-sided uncertainty for two sets of agents A and B, with equal cardinality. Initially, the preference lists of the agents in A are given but the preferences of the agents in B are…
With the growing adoption of machine learning (ML) systems in areas like law enforcement, criminal justice, finance, hiring, and admissions, it is increasingly critical to guarantee the fairness of decisions assisted by ML. In this paper,…