Analytic Methods in Sports: Using Mathematics and Statistics to Understand Data from Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Other Sports

The Most Useful Techniques for Analyzing Sports Data

One of the greatest changes in the sports world in the past 20 years has been the use of mathematical methods to analyze performances, recognize trends and patterns, and predict results. Analytic Methods in Sports: Using Mathematics and Statistics to Understand Data from Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Other Sports provides a concise yet thorough introduction to the analytic and statistical methods that are useful in studying sports.

The book gives you all the tools necessary to answer key questions in sports analysis. It explains how to apply the methods to sports data and interpret the results, demonstrating that the analysis of sports data is often different from standard statistical analysis. Requiring familiarity with mathematics but no previous background in statistics, the book integrates a large number of motivating sports examples throughout and offers guidance on computation and suggestions for further reading in each chapter.

Thomas A. Severini is a professor of statistics at Northwestern University. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the author of Likelihood Methods in Statistics and Elements of Distribution Theory. He received his PhD in statistics from the University of Chicago. His research areas include likelihood inference, nonparametric and semiparametric methods, and applications to econometrics.