3nd October, 5pm

Common Room

Presentations from current PhD students.

10th October, 5pm

Common Room

17th October, 5pm

Common Room

Presentations from new first year PhD students.

24th October, 5pm

Common Room

Francesca Basini

Title: Assessing competitive balance in the English Premier League for over forty seasons using a stochastic block model and some “behind the scenes”.

Abstract: In this talk, I am going to tell you how I ended up publishing a paper about football and why Tottenham Hotspur is my favourite team!
The main focus and motivation for this paper is to assess the issue of competitive balance in the context of the English First Division / Premier League over more than 40 seasons. We develop a Bayesian statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to measure the balance between teams in a league. We represent the outcome of all matches in a football season as a dense network with nodes identified by teams and categorical edges representing the outcome of each game as a win, draw, or a loss. We then infer the network block structure, that is the number of blocks in which the nodes are partitioned and their membership to a block, via efficient MCMC implementation of the allocation sampler.
Our analysis provides evidence suggesting a structural change around the early 2000s from a reasonably balanced league to a two-tier league.

31st October, 4:30pm

Common Room

Speaker: Alexander Kent

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

7th November, 5pm

Common Room

Speaker: Kieran Drury

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

14th November, 5pm

Common Room

Speaker: Alberto Bordino

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

21st November, 5pm

Common Room

Speaker: David Huk

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

28th November, 4:30pm

Common Room

Speaker: Andreea Popescu

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

5th December, 5pm

Common Room

Speaker: Leonardo Baggiani

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC