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Activity Number: 22
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Sunday, August 9, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
Abstract #315616 View Presentation
Title: A Comparison of Probabilistic Rating Systems for Women's Beach Volleyball
Author(s): Mark Glickman* and Jonathan Hennessy
Companies: Boston University and The Houston Rockets
Keywords: paired comparisons ; ranking ; state-space model
Abstract:

Women's beach volleyball became an official Olympic sport in 1996, and continues to attract the participation of amateur and professional female athletes. The most well-known ranking system for women's beach volleyball is a non-probabilistic method used by the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) in which points are accumulated based on results in designated competitions. We investigated the application of several alternative rating systems for head-to-head games as an approach to ranking women's beach volleyball teams. These include the Elo system, the Glicko and Glicko-2 systems, and the Stephenson system, all of which were developed from the Bradley-Terry (1952) model for game results. Based on volleyball competition results over the years 2008-2013 from the World Tour Opens, the World Tour Grand Slams, the World Championships, and the Olympic games, we optimized the parameters for these rating systems using a predictive discrepancy criterion. We present the results of the probability-based systems and compare to the FIVB rankings at the end of 2013.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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