[R] Rating competitors

[Charles C. Berry]

There is a substantial literature on 'statistics in sports' and pairwise 
comparisons are of obvious interest. Here is a starting point:

 	http://www.amstat.org/sections/sis/

You might browse the newsletters posted there.

You might enjoy:

Bridging Different Eras in Sports by Scott M. Berry, Patrick D. Larkey, C. 
Shane Reese; Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 94, 
1999

or

Baseball's All-Time Best Hitters: How Statistics Can Level the Playing 
Field by Michael J. Schell

 	http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6550.html


On Tue, 26 Dec 2006, Jeff Newmiller wrote:

> I am looking for hints on how to estimate ratings for competitors
> in an ongoing pairwise competition using R... my particular area of
> interest being the game of Go, but the idea of identifying ratings
> (on a continuous scale) rather than relative rankings seems easily
> generalized to other competitions so I thought someone might be
> studying something related already.
>
> I presume the rating of a competitor would be best modeled as a random
> variate on the rating scale, and an encounter between two
> competitors would be represented by a binary result.  Logistic regression
> seems promising, but I am at a loss how to represent the model since
> the pairings are arbitrary and not necessarily repeated often.
>
> I have read about some approaches to estimating ratings for Go,
> but they seem to involve optimization using assumed distributions
> rather than model fitting which characterizes analysis in R.
>
> Does any of this sound familiar? Suggestions for reading, anyone?
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
> DCN:<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>        Basics: ##.#.       ##.#.  Live Go...
>                                       Live:   OO#.. Dead: OO#..  Playing
> Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries            O.O#.       #.O#.  with
> /Software/Embedded Controllers)               .OO#.       .OO#.  rocks...1k
>
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Charles C. Berry                        (858) 534-2098
                                          Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	         UC San Diego
http://biostat.ucsd.edu/~cberry/         La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0717