Parity and Predictability of Competitions

Ben‐Naim, E.; Vázquez, Federico; Redner, S.

doi:10.2202/1559-0410.1034

Cited by 38 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In second comes volleyball, followed by soccer and then, handball. This is in accordance with previous analysis using other methods [1,4]. Considering the structure of each sport, it is possible to explain these results.…”

Section: The Skill Coe Cient ϕsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Vaz de melo [25] proposed features to represent the network e ects between the players on the teams performance. In [4], the authors t a idealized and simple theoretical model to empirical data in order to estimate a so-called upset probability q, the chance that a worse team wins. Although simple, the model ts quite well to the data and they conclude that q ≈ 0.45 in the case of soccer and baseball, while q ≈ 0.35 for basketball and football.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Luck is Hard to Beat

Aoki

Assunção

Melo

2017

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

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Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this di culty with a coe cient that measures the distance between the observed nal results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of skill. This indicates the relative presence of luck and skill. We collected and analyzed all games from 198 sports leagues comprising 1503 seasons from 84 countries of 4 di erent sports: basketball, soccer, volleyball and handball. We measured the competitiveness by countries and sports. We also identify in each season which teams, if removed from its league, result in a completely random tournament. Surprisingly, not many of them are needed. As another contribution of this paper, we propose a probabilistic graphical model to learn about the teams' skills and to decompose the relative weights of luck and skill in each game. We break down the skill component into factors associated with the teams' characteristics. The model also allows to estimate as 0.36 the probability that an underdog team wins in the NBA league, with a home advantage adding 0.09 to this probability. As shown in the rst part of the paper, luck is substantially present even in the most competitive championships, which partially explains why sophisticated and complex feature-based models hardly beat simple models in the task of forecasting sports' outcomes. CCS CONCEPTS•Computing methodologies → Model development and analysis; Uncertainty quanti cation;

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Section: The Skill Coe Cient ϕsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Luck is Hard to Beat

Aoki

Assunção

Melo

2017

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

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“…On the team level, the authors of Ref. [19] show that the level of team competition measured in team-versus-team upset probability increases during expansion eras. The second expansion era 1993-1998 saw 4 new teams, accompanied by an increase in average home-run prowess following approximately 20 years of stagnancy.…”

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confidence: 99%

On the distribution of career longevity and the evolution of home-run prowess in professional baseball

2008

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Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and benchmarks assumes that the level of competition in baseball is stationary in time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in baseball. We also find similar power laws in the density functions of all major performance metrics for pitchers and batters. The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a dark history, emerging as a problem for both amateur and professional sports. We find statistical evidence consistent with performance-enhancing drugs in the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years. This is corroborated by the findings of the Mitchell Report [1], a two-year investigation into the use of illegal steroids in major league baseball, which recently revealed that over 5 percent of major league baseball players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in an anonymous 2003 survey.

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“…In fact, the most important contribution at the very beginning is described by the f 3 x−1 term in Eq. (10). The effect of this term is to create random imbalances in the point distribution which in time will make the f 2 x−1 terms more relevant.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A reasonable approach to model the interactions is to involve a finite number of agents at a time and via the rules decide a winner which gains one unit of the attribute used to compare the agents. The interaction may represent, a competitive game for wealth [5]- [8], trophies in sports [9], [10] , opinion dynamics [11]- [13], idea or rumor propagation [14]- [16]. One can also contemplate the emergence of social hierarchies from such models [17]- [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of three-agent games

Mungan¹,

Rador²

2008

J. Phys. A: Math. Theor.

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We study the dynamics and resulting score distribution of three-agent games where after each competition a single agent wins and scores a point. A single competition is described by a triplet of numbers p, t and q denoting the probabilities that the team with the highest, middle or lowest accumulated score wins. We study the full family of solutions in the regime, where the number of agents and competitions is large, which can be regarded as a hydrodynamic limit. Depending on the parameter values (p, q, t), we find six qualitatively different asymptotic score distributions and we also provide a qualitative understanding of these results. We checked our analytical results against numerical simulations of the microscopic model and find these to be in excellent agreement. The three agent game can be regarded as a social model where a player can be favored or disfavored for advancement, based on his/her accumulated score. It is also possible to decide the outcome of a three agent game through a mini tournament of two-agent competitions among the participating players and it turns out that the resulting possible score distributions are a subset of those obtained for the general three agent-games. We discuss how one can add a steady and democratic decline rate to the model and present a simple geometric construction that allows one to write down the corresponding score evolution equations for n-agent games.

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Parity and Predictability of Competitions

Cited by 38 publications

References 9 publications

Luck is Hard to Beat

Luck is Hard to Beat

On the distribution of career longevity and the evolution of home-run prowess in professional baseball

Dynamics of three-agent games

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