01388nam a2200145 a 450000500170000000800400001710000250005724500980008226400160018033600090019633800200020552009050022550600460113085600660117620260901030413.0250101s2020    xx     o     000 0 eng d1 aClaus Thorn Ekstrøm10aHaving a Ball: evaluating scoring streaks and game excitement using in-match trend estimation 1barXivc2020  atext  aonline resource  aMany popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the underlying scoring trends throughout the match. Modeling approaches that accommodate a finer granularity of the score difference throughout the match is needed to evaluate in-game strategies, discuss scoring streaks, teams strengths, and other aspects of the game. We propose a latent Gaussian process to model the score difference between two teams and introduce the Trend Direction Index as an easily interpretable probabilistic measure of the current trend in the match as well as a measure of post-game trend evaluation. In addition we propose the Excitement Trend Index - the expected number of monotonicity changes in the running score difference - as a 0 aOpen access — freely available to read.40uhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.11915v1yRead the full paper (PDF)