A subgraph-based ranking system for professional tennis players David Aparício, Pedro Ribeiro and Fernando Silva 2016

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel ranking system for competitive sports based around the notion of subgraphs and we show its applicability on men’s professional tennis. The results of over 180,000 tennis matches played from 1974 to 2015 are used to create a colored directed dominance network, with colors representing different surfaces and edges depicting head-to-head results between all the 856 players that were in the Top-100 of the ATP official ranking. We start by exploring the general properties of the network that we constructed and show that both their in and out degree distributions follow a power-law. We proceed by describing our proposed ranking system, which relies on considering all the occurrences of size 4 directed subgraphs and in which positions (or orbits) the players appear on the subgraphs. Even with a very sparse network and without any background knowledge on the tournaments and stage of the matches, we show that our proposal is able to extract meaningful rankings which capture the intricate competitive relationships between players from different eras.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

doi 10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_12

Publication in PDF format

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Journal/Conference/Book

7th International Workshop on Complex Networks

Reference (text)

David Aparício, Pedro Ribeiro and Fernando Silva. A subgraph-based ranking system for professional tennis players. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Complex Networks (CompleNet), pp. 159-171, Springer, Dijon, France, March, 2016.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{ribeiro-COMPLENET2016,
  author = {David Aparício and  Pedro Ribeiro and Fernando Silva},
  title = {A subgraph-based ranking system for professional tennis players},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-30569-1_12},
  booktitle = {7th International Workshop on Complex Networks},
  pages = {159-171},
  publisher = {Springer},
  month = {March},
  year = {2016}
}