August 6, 2013 by Charlie Eisenhood in Livewire
The Ultiworld statistics team will present original research at a Sports Analytics workshop of the upcoming European Conference on Machine Learning in Prague. Jeremy Weiss and Sean Childers, the Ultiworld statistics editors, coauthored a paper centered on the scoring maps developed earlier this year.
The paper, titled Maps For Reasoning In Ultimate (pdf), is too advanced for the lay reader, but the basic concept is that Weiss and Childers have developed “heat maps” that display the percentage chance of scoring from a given location on the playing field. They have used the maps to understand more about the NexGen tour’s efficient red zone offense.
The paper was accepted to the Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics workshop; Weiss will present his research there in September. The field of sports analytics has been rapidly developing in the past decade.
I’d like to personally congratulate our stats team on their groundbreaking work — be sure to stay tuned for upcoming statistical analysis of the 2013 NexGen tour, the Pro Flight Finale in Davis, and the Club Championships.
