Science Meets Sports: When Statistics Are More Than Numbers

This book presents the field of sports statistics to two very distinct target audiences, namely academicians, in order to raise their interest in this growing field, and, on the other hand, sports fans, who, even without advanced mathematical knowledge, will be able to understand the data analysis and gain new insights into their favourite sports. The book thus offers a unique perspective on this attractive topic by combining sports analytics, data visualisation and advanced statistical procedures to extract new findings from sports data such as improved rankings or prediction methods. Bringing together insights from football, tennis, basketball, track and field, and baseball, the book will appeal to aficionados of any sport, and, thanks to its cutting-edge data analysis tools, will provide the reader with completely new insights into their favourite sport in an engaging and user-friendly way.

Christophe Ley is Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Ghent University, Belgium. He is also Vice-President of the European Association for Advanced Statistics Courses and the Luxembourg Statistical Society, and initiator of the international network S-TRAINING (Sports -Training and Research in Data Science Methods for Analytics and Injury Prevention Group). He is a recipient of the Marie-Jeanne Laurent-Duhamel prize of the Société Française de Statistique and associate editor for the journals Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and Econometrics and Statistics.

Yves Dominicy is a Data Scientist in the domain of Credit Risk in the banking sector in Luxembourg. He formerly worked as a Research Fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and Lecturer at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, where he received his PhD in Econometrics. He is a member of the Luxembourg Statistical Society Board Committee, and the author of articles in journals such as Journal of Econometrics, International Statistical Review, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.