Journal of Sports Analytics - Volume 8, issue 3

Authors: Malhotra, Gaurav

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The Indian Premier League (IPL), the most successful cricket tournament in India, has immensely grown in popularity. Unlike similar tournaments like Major League Baseball and the UEFA Champions League, their models cannot be replicated due to the dynamic pricing nature of player auctions. The research intends to generate a predictive model that predicts the auction price of a player using key quantitative variables. The players were categorised by batsmen, bowlers, and all-rounders. Due to the holistic hedonic nature of the model, equations were formed to predict a player’s future performance, in terms of measurable points, and to extrapolate economic value …creation given a budget constraint. This study provides insights on the player’s economic value by comparing the auction price paid vs. the player’s actual performance. This new approach to modelling in cricket games not only aims to produce more accurate results using the hedonic pricing method, but also enlightens an introduction to a more holistic modelling process to intricately understand the profiting avenues for team owners to reverse-engineer value additions of players at each level and position. Finally, this model, which considers the factors an IPL franchise would, is being designed to be utilised in future IPL auctions. Show more

Keywords: Auction price, Indian Premier League (IPL), cricket, machine learning, economic value, constrained optimization, valuation

DOI: 10.3233/JSA-200580

Citation: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 149-170, 2022

Authors: Constantinou, Anthony C.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Despite the massive popularity of the Asian Handicap (AH) football (soccer) betting market, its efficiency has not been adequately studied by the relevant literature. This paper combines rating systems with Bayesian networks and presents the first published model specifically developed for prediction and assessment of the efficiency of the AH betting market. The results are based on 13 English Premier League seasons and are compared to the traditional market, where the bets are for win, lose or draw. Different betting situations have been examined including a) both average and maximum (best available) market odds, b) all possible betting decision thresholds …between predicted and published odds, c) optimisations for both return-on-investment and profit, and d) simple stake adjustments to investigate how the variance of returns changes when targeting equivalent profit in both traditional and AH markets. While the AH market is found to share the inefficiencies of the traditional market, the findings reveal both interesting differences as well as similarities between the two. Show more

Keywords: Directed acyclic graph, football prediction, graphical models, profitability, rating system, return-on-investment, soccer prediction

DOI: 10.3233/JSA-200588

Citation: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 171-193, 2022

Authors: Im, Seol Hye | O’Donoghue, Peter

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The purpose of the current investigation was to develop and evaluate an analytics approach to identifying the disciplines that female modern pentathletes should focus on to most improve their total points score. The study comprises of three analyses as well as the description and evaluation of an analytics approach to identify the event that a modern pentathlete should focus on to most improve their overall points. Analysis I revealed that the proportion of total points score derived from the laser run was significantly greater under the currently used scoring system than under the scoring system used prior to 2014 (p … < 0.001). Analysis II considered year to year change in points scored for a set of 243 athletes who had completed performances in successive calendar years. The variability of year to year change in points was significantly influenced by discipline (p  < 0.001) with the highest variability being in the laser run followed by fencing, riding and swimming. Linear and inverse regression models of year to year change were created during Analysis III and used in a simulation package that allowed year to year change to be predicted synthesising increased emphasis being made on different disciplines. The simulation approach suggests that female athletes can expect to make the greatest gains by emphasising the laser run and fencing within training. An evaluation study using six cases largely agreed with this but there was one of the athletes whose highest actual points improvement was in riding. Show more

Keywords: Modern pentathlon, combined events, performance, decision making

DOI: 10.3233/JSA-200593

Citation: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 195-209, 2022

Authors: Morgulev, Elia | Kenett, Ron S. | Arnon, Michal | Lidor, Ronnie | Ben-Sira, David | Tchinio, Izy

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Describing, understanding, predicting, and controlling the improvement of athletic performance are pivotal aspects of sport sciences. Longitudinal trends of the achievements of elite performers, mainly in endurance (e.g., cycling, running, skiing, and swimming) and explosive-power (e.g., jumping, throwing, and weightlifting) sports, were examined in a series of studies. One of the observations in these studies was the significant improvement in performance in the above-mentioned sports over the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In addition, several factors that can account for the observed improvements were outlined and discussed in the previous literature. The current study contributes to this line of research by …examining the rate of improvement in free-throw (FT) shooting of National Basketball Association (NBA) players over a five-decade period –1969–2019. As opposed to many power and endurance sporting events, FT shooting is a fine-motor task performed in a stable and predicted environment. Based on an analysis of more than 2.6 million FT shots, we found that from 1969 to 2019 the FT shooting accuracy fluctuated at around 75%, but did not show any steady trend of improvement. We discuss this finding from a skill-acquisition perspective. Show more

Keywords: Accuracy, closed self-paced sporting tasks, human performance, basketball, free throw

DOI: 10.3233/JSA-200597

Citation: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 211-219, 2022

Authors: Şimşek, Mehmet | Kesilmiş, İnci

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) is an emerging topic in Sports Science. Some pioneering studies have applied machine learning to prevent injuries, to predict star players, and to analyze athletic performance. The limited number of studies in the literature focused on predicting athletic performance have adopted the cluster-then-predict classification approach. However, these studies have used the independent variable to represent athletic performance at both the clustering and classification stages. In this study we used only physiological parameters in the classification of bocce athletes. Their performance classes were predicted with high accuracy, thus contributing new findings to the literature. The support vector machines-radial …basis function (SVM-RBF) kernel correctly predicted all athletes from the high-performance bocce player (HPBP) cluster and 75% of the athletes in the low-performance bocce player (LPBP) cluster. Using machine learning to predict athletic performance from balance data was found to be a time-saving approach for selecting high-potential bocce athletes. Show more

Keywords: Y balance, static balance, bocce, petanque, machine learning, classification

DOI: 10.3233/JSA-200617

Citation: Journal of Sports Analytics, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 221-229, 2022