Students: Thaksheel Alleck, Roman Mitchell & Ori Remen
Project: Underdog Achievement and Randomness in Team Ball Sports | View Poster (PDF)
Major: Industrial & Systems Engineering, Integrated Business & Engineering (IBE)
Advisors: Luis Nunes Vicente & Tommaso Giovannelli
Abstract
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors in such sports. To address our research question, we collected data on match scores and computed corresponding team rankings from major international competitions for~12 popular team ball sports: basketball, cricket, field hockey, futsal, handball, ice hockey, lacrosse, roller hockey, rugby, soccer, volleyball, and water polo. Then, we developed an underdog achievement score to identify the sports with the highest and lowest occurrences of weaker teams prevailing over stronger ones, and we designed a randomness model consisting of factors that contribute to unexpected game outcomes within each sport. Our findings indicate that soccer is the sport in which a weaker team is most likely to win. Through principal component analysis, we demonstrate that our randomness model can explain such a phenomenon, showing that the underdog achievement can be attributed to numerous factors that may randomly influence a team's performance.
About Thaksheel Alleck
Thaksheel Alleck is a junior pursuing a degree in Industrial Systems Engineering and Marketing with a minor in Data Science. He was born and raised in Mauritius. At Lehigh, Thaksheel was the team leader for the Echo Hawk's project with the aim of implementing a voice assistance tool for students to efficiently find campus information and resources such as professors and staff location through a voice interface. Thaksheel is also conducting research with the Chair of the ISE department on sports randomness. His goal as a lead researcher is to create a randomness model to predict the likelihood of a weak team winning against a strong team. He used his thorough understanding of statistics and intermediate skill in python to collect more than 5500 data points and finished a major part of the analysis.
About Roman Mitchell
Roman Mitchell ‘24 is a senior Industrial Systems Engineering major and Economics minor. He is actively involved in Lehigh’s Chapter of National Society of Black Engineers as treasurer, the R.AR.E research program, NACME scholars, and ambassador for the Office of Multicultural Affairs. As a first generation college student, Roman came to Lehigh to take advantage of their opportunities to learn outside of the classroom. He was part of the Iaccoca International Institute ‘22, Lehigh in Munich ‘24, and has done various research projects over his undergraduate career. Roman’s passion is to apply data analytics to help learn how to effectively run businesses and continuously improve where necessary. His goal is to use these skills to understand some of the disparities in the country between economic class levels and improve the economic mobility for people of color.
About Ori Remen
Ori Remen is a Senior at Lehigh University majoring in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Ori is involved in a research project about randomness in sports for the OutreachISE Program. The goal of the research project was to create a randomness model given certain factors which would help predict how often a team of weaker skill can win against a team of stronger skill. Ori is interested in statistics, data analytics and optimization. Ori is part of Theta Chi Fraternity and likes to play soccer, chess and poker.