An Application of Stochastic Dominances in Sports Analytics

Abstract

Stochastic orders or stochastic dominance as they are known in economics, have been widely studied and applied in a variety of scientific fields, from biology to Systems Engineering. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is an application gap in the field of Sports Analytics or Sports Sciences. In this paper, we attempt a first approach to a possible application of stochastic orders to a dataset of LaLiga (Spain) football matches. Our aim is simply to show how a comparison can be extended beyond a simple metric comparison. In particular, we will focus on the first and second dominance stochastic orders as they are the most intuitive and simple to interpret and are also the most widely used in economics.