On the (Page)Ranking of Professional Tennis Players

Dingle, Nicholas J. and Knottenbelt, William J. and Spanias, Demetris (2012) On the (Page)Ranking of Professional Tennis Players. In: 28th UK Performance Engineering Workshop (UKPEW 2012), 2 July 2012, Edinburgh.

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Abstract

We explore the relationship between official rankings of professional tennis players and rankings computed using a variant of the PageRank algorithm as proposed by Radicchi in 2011. We show Radicchi�s equations follow a natural interpretation of the PageRank algorithm and present up-to-date comparisons of official rankings with PageRank-based rankings for both the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and Women�s Tennis Association (WTA) tours. For top-ranked players these two rankings are broadly in line; however, there is wide variation in the tail which leads us to question the degree to which the official ranking mechanism reflects true player ability. For a 390-day sample of recent tennis matches, PageRank-based rankings are found to be better predictors of match outcome than the official rankings.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 60 Probability theory and stochastic processes MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 65 Numerical analysis MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 68 Computer science
Depositing User:	Dr Nicholas Dingle
Date Deposited:	03 Jul 2012
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2017 14:13
URI:	https://eprints.maths.manchester.ac.uk/id/eprint/1845

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