MS2Discovery Talk: Some Problems in Sports Analytics

Date - Wednesday October 26, 2022, 4:00pm

Room: Mathematics Boardroom - LH3058

Title - Some Problems in Sports Analytics

This non-technical talk concerns the nascent field of

sports analytics. Some stories are told (pulling the goalie in hockey,

sports gambling, etc) and then some research topics in soccer are introduced.

In particular, we discuss the benefit and disadvantages of crossing

the ball and ``parking the bus''. We also propose a new metric for

off-the-ball evaluation. Exploration of these topics in soccer have

been made available through the use of tracking data.

Bio: Tim Swartz is Professor, Department of Statistics and Actuarial

Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada. Swartz has a BMath in

Statistics and Computing Science from the University of Waterloo and

MSc and PhD degrees in Statistics from the University of Toronto. He

has over 100 research publications and has written several books including

an Oxford text (2000) with Michael Evans on Approximating Integrals via

Monte Carlo and Deterministic Methods. He is a Fellow of the American

Statistical Association, and most of is current research involves

sports analytics.