The predictive power of popular sports ranking methods in the NFL, NBA, and NHL

Ideally, a ranking method for a sports tournament will be not only fair and comprehensive, but it will also possess strong predictive power. In a recent article, the ( 1 , α ) method was proposed as being fair and comprehensive in comparison with five other popular sports ranking methods. In this st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inOperational research Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 2767 - 2783
Main Authors Dabadghao, S. S., Vaziri, B.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.07.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Business and Management
Computational Intelligence
Management Science
Methods
Operations Research
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Professional basketball
Professional sports
Ranking
Ratings & rankings
Sports
Sports betting
Tournaments & championships
Ranking
Markov
Predictive power
Sports
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Summary:Ideally, a ranking method for a sports tournament will be not only fair and comprehensive, but it will also possess strong predictive power. In a recent article, the ( 1 , α ) method was proposed as being fair and comprehensive in comparison with five other popular sports ranking methods. In this study, we will compare the predictive power of the ( 1 , α ) method against five popular sports ranking methods (Win-loss, Massey, Colley, Markov, and Elo) for the NFL, NBA, and NHL in the last two decades. We use regular season results to obtain the ranking vector, and then evaluate said ranking vector on its ability to predict playoff results using both a frequency count and McNemar’s test of statistical significance.
ISSN:1109-2858
1866-1505
DOI:10.1007/s12351-021-00630-9