33,812 research outputs found
Extended Ordered Paired Comparison Models with Application to Football Data from German Bundesliga
A general paired comparison model for the evaluation of sports competitions
is proposed. It efficiently uses the available information by allowing
for ordered response categories and team-specific home advantage effects.
Penalized estimation techniques are used to identify clusters of teams that
share the same ability. The model is extended to include team-specific
explanatory variables. It is shown that regularization techniques allow to
identify the contribution of explanatory variables to the success of teams.
The usefulness of the methods is demonstrated by investigating the performance
and its dependence on the budget for football teams of the German
Bundesliga
How good is Tiger Woods?
A major objective of professional sport is to find out which player or team is the best. Unfortunately the structure of some sports means that this is often a
difficult question to answer. For example, there may be too many competitors to run a round-robin league, whilst knock-out tournaments do not compare every player with every other player.
The problem gets worse when one has to compare players whose performance varies over time.
Fortunately mathematical modelling can help and in this article, we use the Plackett-Luce model to estimate time-varying player strengths of golfers.
We use the model to investigate how good golf's current biggest attraction, Tiger Woods, really is
Analysing Human Mobility Patterns of Hiking Activities through Complex Network Theory
The exploitation of high volume of geolocalized data from social sport
tracking applications of outdoor activities can be useful for natural resource
planning and to understand the human mobility patterns during leisure
activities. This geolocalized data represents the selection of hike activities
according to subjective and objective factors such as personal goals, personal
abilities, trail conditions or weather conditions. In our approach, human
mobility patterns are analysed from trajectories which are generated by hikers.
We propose the generation of the trail network identifying special points in
the overlap of trajectories. Trail crossings and trailheads define our network
and shape topological features. We analyse the trail network of Balearic
Islands, as a case of study, using complex weighted network theory. The
analysis is divided into the four seasons of the year to observe the impact of
weather conditions on the network topology. The number of visited places does
not decrease despite the large difference in the number of samples of the two
seasons with larger and lower activity. It is in summer season where it is
produced the most significant variation in the frequency and localization of
activities from inland regions to coastal areas. Finally, we compare our model
with other related studies where the network possesses a different purpose. One
finding of our approach is the detection of regions with relevant importance
where landscape interventions can be applied in function of the communities.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, accepte
General highlight detection in sport videos
Attention is a psychological measurement of human reflection against stimulus. We propose a general framework of highlight detection by comparing attention intensity during the watching of sports videos. Three steps are involved: adaptive selection on salient features, unified attention estimation and highlight identification. Adaptive selection computes feature correlation to decide an optimal set of salient features. Unified estimation combines these features by the technique of multi-resolution autoregressive (MAR) and thus creates a temporal curve of attention intensity. We rank the intensity of attention to discriminate boundaries of highlights. Such a framework alleviates semantic uncertainty around sport highlights and leads to an efficient and effective highlight detection. The advantages are as follows: (1) the capability of using data at coarse temporal resolutions; (2) the robustness against noise caused by modality asynchronism, perception uncertainty and feature mismatch; (3) the employment of Markovian constrains on content presentation, and (4) multi-resolution estimation on attention intensity, which enables the precise allocation of event boundaries
Measuring impact of academic research in computer and information science on society
Academic research in computer & information science (CIS) has
contributed immensely to all aspects of society. As academic
research today is substantially supported by various government
sources, recent political changes have created ambivalence
amongst academics about the future of research funding. With
uncertainty looming, it is important to develop a framework to
extract and measure the information relating to impact of CIS
research on society to justify public funding, and demonstrate the
actual contribution and impact of CIS research outside academia.
A new method combining discourse analysis and text mining of a
collection of over 1000 pages of impact case study documents
written in free-text format for the Research Excellence
Framework (REF) 2014 was developed in order to identify the
most commonly used categories or headings for reporting impact
of CIS research by UK Universities (UKU). According to the
research reported in REF2014, UKU acquired 83 patents in
various areas of CIS, created 64 spin-offs, generated £857.5
million in different financial forms, created substantial
employment, reached over 6 billion users worldwide and has
helped save over £1 billion Pounds due to improved processes etc.
to various sectors internationally, between 2008 and 2013
Management of the technical training process of athletes in cycling sports
In cyclic sports, the main indicator that characterizes adversarial activity is the average speed of passing
distances. The presence of functional dependencies of speed factors on various indicators of sports activity can
determine its dynamics. It allows to simulate the process of competitive activity, and according to the dynamics
of speed, to determine the nature of a particular indicator. Cyclists and swimmers defined law of motion, the
dependence of the athlete's instantaneous speed and its acceleration ontime, applied forces, resistance forces and
forces of inertia, as well as on specific physical and morphological data. The presence of a mathematical model
allows us to create an adaptive system for controlling the technical preparedness of athletes in cyclic sports
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