A data‐driven approach to predicting the most valuable player in a game

Abstract

The identification of outstanding behaviors is a matter of essential importance in sports analytics. However, analyzing how human experts select each match's most valuable player (MVP) according to objective and subjective factors is a great challenge. This article proposes a data-driven approach for sports team performance based on the weighted aggregation of statistical indicators. The proposal is divided into two approaches: The first conducts a principal component analysis to examine the relationship between each game's statistical indicators.The other addresses a meta-heuristic analysis to weight the attributes and choose the MVPs optimally. Finally, we apply the proposed approach to the 2018 European Men's Handball Championship and take the "Player of the Match" of each game as an example to illustrate its usefulness and efficacy. We perform multiple analyses, including a comparison with a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making method that show that the data-driven approach can predict the "Player of the Match" in most matches. It also allows us to estimate and quantify the expert evaluations, which are often difficult to obtain in a disaggregated form.

Predicting Team Advancement in Major League Baseball Postseason Using Borda Count

“…The Borda count is a voting method employed to rank or rate options. In the context of predicting sports event outcomes, it can be applied in various domains such as ranking teams or athletes and forecasting match rankings [8][9][10][11][12]. In order to analyse the data, we conducted normalization proceduce and Borda count to determine each MLB team's performance.…”

A comparison of different soft-computing techniques for the evaluation of handball goalkeepers

“…The final weighting scheme is obtained from these opinions after applying different fuzzy logic techniques of consensus and aggregation (Romero et al 2020). • Metaheuristic Weighting The weighting process can be transformed into an optimisation process in which we seek the maximum alignment of the weights obtained with the judgement of the experts in the competition (Chỳna et al 2013;Romero et al 2021). With this aim, those weights that optimise the choice of the most valued goalkeeper or the choice and ranking of the five best goalkeepers in the competition are then found.…”