Player selection is one of the great challenges of professional soccer clubs. Despite extensive use of performance data, a large number of player transfers at the highest level of club soccer have less than satisfactory outcome. This study uses player performance and decision making data to...

Recreational golf events differ from professional events in that the primary goal is not simply to identify the best golfer, but rather for all golfers to enjoy and participate meaningfully in the competition. For this reason, it can be beneficial in recreational events to employ...

The desire to promote healthier and more environmentally conscious methods of commuting has generated increased interest in professional and recreational bicycling in recent years. One of the most important factors cyclists consider when riding is the amount of exertion they will perceive on a...

In this paper, we develop a Markov decision process (MDP) model to determine when a player should challenge a line call in a game of tennis, if the objective is to maximize the probability of winning the game. The parameters in the model include the relative strength of the players and the...

Whether the nature of the risks associated with climbing high-altitude (8000 m) peaks is in some sense “controllable” is a longstanding debate in the mountaineering community. Well-known mountaineers David Roberts and Ed Viesturs explore this issue in their recent memoirs. Roberts views the...

In this paper, we model a basketball player’s on-court production as a function of the percentiles corresponding to the number of games played. A player’s production curve is flexibly estimated using Gaussian process regression. The hierarchical structure of the model allows us to borrow...

Gender gaps in absolute performance at the Olympics are well-established, while gender differences in relative performance have not been considered. We analyzed time trends in male and female performance improvement for medal results in all individual athletics and swimming events in Olympic...

What is the best male and female athletics performance in history? We seek to answer this question for Olympic distance track events by simultaneously modelling race performances over all Olympic distances and all times. Our model uses techniques from a branch of statistics called extreme value...

The UEFA Champions League Round of 16 is characterized by restrictions that prevent teams from the same preliminary group and the same nations from matches against each other. Together with the draw procedure currently employed by UEFA, this leads to odd probabilities: in 2012/2013, there were...

This paper develops a simulator for matches in Major League Baseball (MLB). Aspects of the approach that are studied include the introduction of base-running probabilities which were obtained through a large data set, and the simulation of nine possible outcomes for each at-bat. Various...