Cattelan, Manuela, Varin, Cristiano and Firth, David (2010) Stochastic dynamic Thurstone-Mosteller models for sports tournaments. Working Paper. Coventry: University of Warwick. Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology. (Working papers).

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Abstract

In the course of national sports tournaments, usually lasting several months, it is expected that the abilities of teams taking part in the tournament change in time. A dynamic extension of the Thurstone-Mosteller model for paired comparison data is introduced to model the outcomes of sporting contests allowing for time-varying abilities. It is assumed that the development of teams' abilities follows a stationary process and a team-specific home effect is considered. The likelihood function of the proposed model requires the approximation of a high dimensional integral. This difficulty is overcome by means of maximum simulated likelihood via the Geweke-Hajivassiliou-Keane algorithm. Ranking of teams and forecasting future match results are performed through a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The methodology is applied to sports data with and without tied contests, namely the 2006-2007 Italian volleyball league and the 2008-2009 Italian Serie A football season.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Divisions:	Faculty of Science > Statistics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Sports tournaments -- Mathematical models
Series Name:	Working papers
Publisher:	University of Warwick. Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology
Place of Publication:	Coventry
Date:	September 2010
Volume:	Vol.2010
Number:	No.19
Number of Pages:	25
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
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URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/35114

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