What's interesting about Cricket?: on thresholds and anticipation in discovered rules

  • Authors:
  • John F. Roddick;Sally Rice

  • Affiliations:
  • Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide 5001, South Australia;University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes 5095, South Australia

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Despite significant progress, determining the interestingness of a rule remains a difficult problem. This short paper investigates the lessons that may be learned from analysing the (largely manual) selection of interesting statistics for cricket (or any other data rich sport) by experts. In particular, the effect of thresholds on the interestingness of rules describing events in the sporting arena is discussed. The concept of anticipation is shown also to be critical in this selection and to vary the level of interest in events that may contribute to the achievement of a threshold value during a match, thus adding a temporal dimension to interestingness. This temporal aspect can be best modelled on the single-past-branching-future model of time. As a result of this investigation, a few new general ideas are discussed that add to the research in this area. Significantly, some of the new criteria are implicitly temporal in that they rely on a model of behaviour over time. The applicability of threshold values for detecting uncharacteristically poor performances are canvassed as areas of interest yet to be explored.