Papers worth the commute

Ollie Mercer

@statsandstuds

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Twelve papers I've actually read, not just added to a folder called 'To Read' that mocks me every time I open my laptop. Half of it's football analytics, because someone has to explain why my marking is statistically indefensible. The other half is machine learning classics I use at work and pretend to fully understand at parties. Best consumed on a delayed Central line train, ideally between the Tate and a Sunday League warm-up.

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Papers worth the commute — 10 items
Name	Authors	Year	Field	Why
1Actions Speak Louder than Goals: Valuing Player Actions in Soccer	Tom Decroos, Lotte Bransen, Jan Van Haaren, Jesse Davis	2019	Sports analytics	Turns every misplaced backpass into a number. I've muttered VAEP values after conceding at Hackney Marshes. Didn't improve my marking.
2Wide Open Spaces: A Statistical Technique for Measuring Space Creation in Professional Soccer	Javier Fernández, Luke Bornn	2018	Sports analytics	Space you create just by existing. My version of space creation is standing still and hoping. This paper made me feel worse about that.
3Physics-Based Modeling of Pass Probabilities in Soccer	William Spearman, Austin Basye, Greg Dick, Ryan Hotovy, Paul Pop	2017	Sports analytics	Proper physics for a five-yard pass to the keeper. Overkill for Sunday League, essential for sounding clever about xT down the pub.
4Decomposing the Immeasurable Sport: A Deep Learning Expected Possession Value Framework for Soccer	Karun Singh	2019	Sports analytics	Values every touch on the pitch. Tried explaining EPV to my strike partner at half time. He just wanted the orange slices.
5Which Pass Is Better? Novel Approaches to Assess Passing Effectiveness in Elite Soccer	Robert Rein, Dominik Raabe, Daniel Memmert	2017	Sports science	Academic cover for why my sideways ball to the keeper counts as 'progressive'. I've printed the abstract and laminated it.
6Attention Is All You Need	Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, et al.	2017	Machine learning	The paper that broke my LinkedIn feed. Read it on the Central line, missed my stop twice, arrived at training late.
7A Mathematical Theory of Communication	Claude E. Shannon	1948	Information theory	Everything in my day job traces back to this bloke in 1948. Felt rude never having actually read it properly.
8Random Forests	Leo Breiman	2001	Statistics	The model I reach for when I can't be bothered thinking properly. Like picking the same back four every week.
9Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space	Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean	2013	Natural language processing	Turns words into vectors so computers get confused by language too. Oddly comforting on a bad commute.
10ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks	Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton	2012	Computer vision	The paper that taught computers to spot a cat. Still can't get one to spot my runner at a corner.

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