Abstract
We explore the relationship between official rankings of professional tennis players and rankings computed using a variant of the PageRank algorithm as proposed by Radicchi in 2011. We show Radicchi’s equations follow a natural interpretation of the PageRank algorithm and present up-to-date comparisons of official rankings with PageRank-based rankings for both the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tours. For top-ranked players these two rankings are broadly in line; however, there is wide variation in the tail which leads us to question the degree to which the official ranking mechanism reflects true player ability. For a 390-day sample of recent tennis matches, PageRank-based rankings are found to be better predictors of match outcome than the official rankings.
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Dingle, N., Knottenbelt, W., Spanias, D. (2013). On the (Page) Ranking of Professional Tennis Players. In: Tribastone, M., Gilmore, S. (eds) Computer Performance Engineering. EPEW UKPEW 2012 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7587. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36781-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36781-6_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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