Related papers: Parity and Predictability of Competitions
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…
Converting betting odds into accurate outcome probabilities is a fundamental challenge in order to use betting odds as a benchmark for sports forecasting and market efficiency analysis. In this study, we propose two methods to overcome the…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
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 propose and study a new model for competitions, specifically sports multi-player leagues where the initial strengths of the teams are independent i.i.d. random variables that evolve during different days of the league according to…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Competitive balance in a football league is extremely important from the perspective of economic growth of the industry. Many researchers have earlier proposed different measures of competitive balance, which are primarily adapted from the…
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…
Predicting outcomes in sports is important for teams, leagues, bettors, media, and fans. Given the growing amount of player tracking data, sports analytics models are increasingly utilizing spatially-derived features built upon player…
During the last few sports seasons a lot of discussion has been generated for the several, high-profile, "comebacks" that were observed in almost all sports. The Cavaliers won the championship after being down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA finals'…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
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…
In a wide class of paired comparisons, especially in the sports games, in which all subjects are divided into several groups, the intragroup comparisons are dense and the intergroup comparisons are sparse. Typical examples include the NFL…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…
In recent years sports analytics has gotten more and more popular. We propose a model for Rugby data - in particular to model the 2014 Six Nations tournament. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the characteristics that…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
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…
The rankability of data is a recently proposed problem that considers the ability of a dataset, represented as a graph, to produce a meaningful ranking of the items it contains. To study this concept, a number of rankability measures have…