Recently, the surge of predictive analytics competitions has improved sports predictions by fostering data-driven inference and steering clear of human bias. This article details methods developed for Kaggle’s March Machine Learning Mania competition for the 2014 NCAA tournament. A submission...

Computing and machine learning advancements have led to the creation of many cutting-edge predictive algorithms, some of which have been demonstrated to provide more accurate forecasts than traditional statistical tools. In this manuscript, we provide evidence that the combination of modest...

Predicting the outcome of a single sporting event is difficult; predicting all of the outcomes for an entire tournament is a monumental challenge. Despite the difficulties, millions of people compete each year to forecast the outcome of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which spans 63...

We show that a classical model for soccer can also provide competitive results in predicting basketball outcomes. We modify the classical model in two ways in order to capture both the specific behavior of each National collegiate athletic association (NCAA) conference and different strategies...

The widespread proliferation of and interest in bracket pools that accompany the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament have created a need to produce a set of predicted winners for each tournament game by people without expert knowledge of college...

The standard metric for American football field goal kickers is simply the percentage of attempts successfully converted. Due to variance in distance of attempts and other conditions (weather, altitude, defense, etc.), we argue that field goal percentage is an insufficient measure of kicker...

This paper considers the decision problem of when to declare during the third innings of a test cricket match. There are various factors that affect the decision of the declaring team including the target score, the number of overs remaining, the relative desire to win versus draw, and the...

Objectives: Identifying performance indicators related to rugby sevens competition outcomes will inform development of team tactics that increase the likelihood of success. This study characterized 16 team performance indicators and quantified the effect of changes and differences in performance...

We consider the modeling of individual batting performance in one-day international (ODI) cricket by using a batsman-specific hidden Markov model (HMM). The batsman-specific number of hidden states allows us to account for the heterogeneous dynamics found in batting performance. Parallel...