On the (page) ranking of professional tennis players

  • Authors:

  • Nicholas Dingle;William Knottenbelt;Demetris Spanias

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, United Kingdom;Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom;Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • EPEW'12 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Computer Performance Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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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.