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I noticed something last night while watching the Djokovic US Open quarter-final. It featured an "IBM Insights" segment which claimed to have mined 8 years wort

I noticed something last night while watching the Djokovic US Open quarter-final. It featured an "IBM Insights" segment which claimed to have mined 8 years worth of Majors competitions to generate stats. And one interesting result it was able to produce went something like this: if Djokovic is able to return only 25% of his opponents serves, then in 85% of past matches it has resulted in victory for him. The implication being that such is the strength of his defensive game. While this is no doubt really interesting, I find I am getting diminishing returns from outputting stats like this from big dumps of past historical data. What I would like to be able to show is a live heat graph style stats tracker, where each point in the match updates my belief net about who is winning, or playing better. Of course, the final outcome may be upended by some fluke occurrence such as a Hail Mary pass in the final seconds which is what makes sports interesting, but nonetheless I think a live tracker would say a lot more than the actual score of the match. So, I am wondering if anyone has specific resources for real time online data mining? At web scale for high throughput data streams. And I agree with shubmajain above, libraries and repos are preferable to books and academic journals ;)

msellout 11y ago
I don't understand that IBM Insights note about Djokovic. Can you explain more?
- hguant 11y ago
  Without doing the math - Djokovic is such a strong player that even if he's only returning a quarter of your serves, meaning you're 3/4's of the way to winning your set (I don't tennis, sorry if I'm getting the terms wrong), he's still probably going to beat you.
  - msellout 11y ago
    It's hard to take any action based on that fact without further information. Even a gambler couldn't use that tidbit without conditioning on things like the current score. Or am I missing something?
  - elechi 11y ago
    Well, that's a close explanation, except I think you're confusing set and match. For men's tennis, it takes 3 sets to win the match, with the potential of playing 5 sets. I'm actually not sure that the math is true, though. (Or I really don't understand what the stat is saying.) Let's say that it actually is for every 4 serves, you win 3, Djokovic wins 1. That number gives you every game (winning the game game-point-15), to give you every set. I don't see how Djokovic ever wins a game, let alone the set or match.
kilbuz 11y ago
The insight was related to winning first-service points when returning serve. This tweet has a screenshot of the association: https://twitter.com/lapsu/status/620223838895407104 https://twitter.com/lapsu/status/620223838895407104 This isn't too far from the logic: "How can we win this game? Score more points than the other team". I suppose the more interesting thing would be to compare the same correlation across players.
Expeditus419 11y ago
I agree that the stats don't provide insight regarding game play and strategy. IBM has been providing the same weak stats for years now. I would like to see tennis incorporate the hawk-eye system tracking player movement and shot placement as well. Perhaps that could produce a heat map. On that note they can also eliminate the line judges while we're at it. The whole challenge system is idiotic. They have the tech, they should incorporate it throughout the sport.

msellout 11y ago

I don't understand that IBM Insights note about Djokovic. Can you explain more?

hguant 11y ago
Without doing the math - Djokovic is such a strong player that even if he's only returning a quarter of your serves, meaning you're 3/4's of the way to winning your set (I don't tennis, sorry if I'm getting the terms wrong), he's still probably going to beat you.
- msellout 11y ago
  It's hard to take any action based on that fact without further information. Even a gambler couldn't use that tidbit without conditioning on things like the current score. Or am I missing something?
- elechi 11y ago
  Well, that's a close explanation, except I think you're confusing set and match. For men's tennis, it takes 3 sets to win the match, with the potential of playing 5 sets. I'm actually not sure that the math is true, though. (Or I really don't understand what the stat is saying.) Let's say that it actually is for every 4 serves, you win 3, Djokovic wins 1. That number gives you every game (winning the game game-point-15), to give you every set. I don't see how Djokovic ever wins a game, let alone the set or match.

kilbuz 11y ago

The insight was related to winning first-service points when returning serve. This tweet has a screenshot of the association: https://twitter.com/lapsu/status/620223838895407104 https://twitter.com/lapsu/status/620223838895407104 This isn't too far from the logic: "How can we win this game? Score more points than the other team". I suppose the more interesting thing would be to compare the same correlation across players.

Expeditus419 11y ago

I agree that the stats don't provide insight regarding game play and strategy. IBM has been providing the same weak stats for years now. I would like to see tennis incorporate the hawk-eye system tracking player movement and shot placement as well. Perhaps that could produce a heat map. On that note they can also eliminate the line judges while we're at it. The whole challenge system is idiotic. They have the tech, they should incorporate it throughout the sport.