I previously talked about the use of the classic Bradley-Terry model and its applicability to a wide variety of situations from ranking in machine learning algorithms through to modelling sports teams. In this post I will briefly outline some of the main modifications to the model over the last 60 years, extending its use into a wider range of situations.

In many sports that are played in front of a partisan crowd there is often a benefit to the team being supported. This is the concept of “Home Advantage“, where the local team tends to perform better than the visiting team. This is not just because of crowd support, it might also include the fact that the home team are more experienced at playing in those conditions – think of the England’s cricketing struggles in the Indian subcontinient!

A mathematical form for this was suggested by Agresti (1990) which is given below,

$P(i \text{ beats } j | i \text{ at home }) = \cfrac{\theta\lambda_i}{\theta\lambda_i + \lambda_j}$

$P(i \text{ beats } j | j \text{ at home }) = \cfrac{\lambda_i}{\lambda_i + \theta\lambda_j}$

Here the parameter $\theta > 1$ represents the size of the home-field advantage, the larger the value the more likely the home team wins.

This idea is formally known as a Bradley-Terry model (1952), where the chance of Alice or Bob winning are in proportion to their skill levels. If Alice has a skill level of $\lambda_A$ and Bob has a skill level of $\lambda_B$, then the probability that either one wins is the ratio of their skill level to their combined total skill level.
$P(Alice \text{ beats } Bob) = \cfrac{\lambda_A}{\lambda_A + \lambda_B}$
$P(Bob \text{ beats } Alice) = \cfrac{\lambda_B}{\lambda_A + \lambda_B}$