Proposal Description

As Chair of the ISI Special Interest Group (SIG) on Sport statistics, together with Paola Zuccolotto (University of Brescia, Italy; co-Chair of the BDsports https://bodai.unibs.it/bdsports/) and Christophe Ley (University of Luxembourg, co-chair of S-TRAINING https://s-training.eu/), we would like to submit a proposal for two Invited Paper Sessions at the ISI WSC 2025. Both session will be focused on Statistics in Sports, of course, with attention to both methodology and application and would represent our SIG at the WSC. Chairs, discussants and speakers have agreed to participate. These sessions contribute to the aim of the SIG that is to promote the understanding, development and good practice of sports statistics worldwide, with particular focus on methodological problems involved and the in-field application of methods and models. This session is composed of four studies that show how statistical methods and models can be applied to different data sources for several aims.
The first talk proposes an original approach to assess the physiological adaptation of professional football players using heart rate indicators and statistical/machine learning techniques. The second talk will give an overview on the use of Bayesian statistical methods in the analysis of football data with several aims. The third talk proposes to analyse sports data and detect momentum shifts within matches by means of Markov-modulated Poisson processes. The fourth talk will showcase the power of sports analytics in a global sporting event like the Olympics, specifically within the context of handball. The session will offer a view on the current state and future directions of statistics applied to sports. The talks propose different research questions and methodological approaches and emphasize innovative ideas in sports statistics. Besides fostering scientific research, results impact on the sport sector, where statistical practitioners will find insights to use state-of-the-art methods for data collection, analysis and interpretation. The organizer, chair and presenters are from several countries and a gender balance is achieved, although in sports statistics there is a clear prevalence of men over women.