Sports Analytics Taxonomy

Gary Cokins writes:

My analytics colleagues,
  
I am writing you to share a recently published article that I co-authored describing a “sports analytics taxonomy”. Everyone loves sports !  ...

The article is a result of a volunteer task force I am on with three others with www.informs.org . As some of you may know INFORMS is a premier professional society with the operations research (OR) community. My 1971 Cornell University degree was in OR.

What led to writing this article was my first meeting with the other task force members. Each has been involved with consulting to professional sports teams and in some cases university athletic departments. I naively presumed that sports analytics is narrowly limited to professional athlete selection or salary negotiations and sports fans interest in “statistics”. I quickly discovered that it covers much broader applications such as stadium management, league scheduling, athlete biology performance, and gambling. I suggested that we first develop a “taxonomy” with tree-branches-leaves to capture the wide breadth of sports analytics, and which can serve as a platform for many applications described in the article (e.g., assessing the maturity of analytical methods to support decisions, indexing articles and academic papers).

The article is on pages 40-43 in the magazine in this link (and if you care to receive its pdf file of its 4 pages, request it from me) :

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/085442e2#/085442e2/42?platform=hootsuite

You can read about what is occupying my time since I retired from SAS in my website at www.garycokins.com .  ....