相关论文: Luck is Hard to Beat: The Difficulty of Sports Pre…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
Sports analytics -- broadly defined as the pursuit of improvement in athletic performance through the analysis of data -- has expanded its footprint both in the professional sports industry and in academia over the past 30 years. In this…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than to be good, but when it comes to winning NCAA tournament pools, do you need to be both? This paper attempts to answer this question using data from the 2014 men's basketball tournament…
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…
Predicting the outcomes of future events is a challenging problem for which a variety of solution methods have been explored and attempted. We present an empirical comparison of a variety of online and offline adaptive algorithms for…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…
We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…