AUEB Sports Analytics Group
Team Leaders
Dimitris Karlis is a professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics of Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). Prof. Karlis has a numerous research articles in methodological and computational journals of Statistics. Over the last years he is more and more involved in projects related with Biostatistics and Big data He is actively developed high quality applied research in modelling Sports data with emphasis in football and betting.
Ioannis Ntzoufras is a Professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics at Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). He is working in the area of Bayesian modelling and computation with emphasis in variable selection. He has published a worldwide best seller book on Bayesian modelling. In parallel with his main research activities he has worked on modelling football data, measures of competitive balance in sports leagues and performance analysis in Volleyball.
Group Members
Panos Repoussis is a Lecturer at the Department of Marketing and Communication, School of Business at Athens University of Economics and Business (Athens, Greece) and Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology (New Jersey, USA). Panos main interests are Mathematical modelling and development of computational intelligent algorithms for solving complex dynamic, stochastic combinatorial optimization problems with varying dimensions and real-time decision support systems in operational planning and scheduling of resources.
Sotiris Drikos is the ex-manager of the Greek national Volleyball team and he holds a PhD from the School of Physical Education and Sports Science of the University of Athens. He is currently working on building models for performance analysis in Volleyball. He is a member of the team since 2015.
Vasilios Manasis is a post-doc researcher at the Department of Statistics of Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). Dr Manasis is an expert on measuring competitive balance in Sports and he has extensively studied the Economic effect of competitiveness in European football leagues.
Kostis Matzorakis is a PhD student at the Department of Statistics AUEB. He is currently working on Statistical Modelling of Water Polo data.
Ilias Leriou is a PhD student at the Department of Statistics AUEB. He is currently working on Bayesian Survival Models with applications in Football arrival times.
Vasilis Palaskas is an M.Sc. Graduate from the Department of Statistics AUEB. He is currently working on Bayesian Modelling of the Sets in Volleyball.
External Collaborators
Leonardo Egidi, postdoctoral researcher, Department of Business, Economics, Mathematics and Statistics (DEAMS), University of Trieste (Italy). Leonardo he got his PhD in Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. His research mainly focuses on both theoretical and applied Bayesian statistics, with a particular attention to models for sports data, such as football and volleyball. He also provides statistical consultancy to small firms, hospitals and medical departments.
Angelos Alexopoulos is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). His main research interests lie in the areas of computational statistics and statistical modelling of biological, economic and sport data. He obtained his PhD in statistics from Athens University of Economics and Business and has worked at the past as post-doctoral research at University College London (UCL). He has worked with the AUEB sports analytics group on the analysis of Tennis data and on the career prediction of the Greek well known player Tsitsipas.
Panagiotis Meletakos is an expert in Handball as a coach of Greek A1 teams for several years. He is holding a PhD from the School of Physical Education and Sports Science of the University of Athens. In his Scientific interests are included performance analysis in Invasion games and competitive balance in national leagues.
Stefan Kesenne is an Emeritus Professor at the University Antwerp and University of Leuven. His research has set the basis of the modern theory of Sport Economics. He is the author of the book "The Economic Theory of Professional Team Sports". Professor Kesenne serves as the academic advisor of the group in topics of Economic theory and issues related with competitive balance. He will also one of the main tutors in future seminars, conferences and events of the AUEB sports analytics group.
Konstantinos Pelechrinis is an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his diploma from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, while he holds a PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science of the University of California, at Riverside. His research interests include applied data science and machine learning, with an emphasis on applications in urban science and sports. He has consulted for professional sports teams, while he has also received the prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office for his research on multidimensional networks.
Ioannis Kosmidis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Science, at University College London. His theoretical and methodological research focuses on penalized likelihood methods for optimal estimation and inference of statistical models, and clustering methods. He is working on a range of applications in sports, including investigations on the statistical and structural interdependence between health, fitness, fatigue and performance, and the modelling of game dynamics in team sports. He is also the leader of the Statistics in Sports and Health research group at UCL.
Nial Friel is a Professor at University College Dublin. He has performed cutting edge research in the areas of Bayesian Statistics, computation, networks. He is currently working with Dimitris Karlis and Ioannis Ntzoufras in developing new dynamic models for predicting football outcomes.
Evgenia Tzoumaka is a Lecturer at the American College of Greece Marketing Department and Sports Management Program. She holds a Ph.D. in International Marketing from the Athens University of Economics & Business, for which she has been awarded the international João Havelange Research Scholarship by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA). In her thesis, she developed a statistical model to operationalise the consumer-based brand equity of celebrity athletes.Her current research focuses on sports celebrity brands, consumer-based brand equity, sports sponsorship and social identification effects on consumer behavior.
Gianluca Baio, Reader in Statistics & Health Economics, Department of Statistical Science, University College London. Gianluca graduated in Statistics and Economics from the University of Florence (Italy). He then completed a PhD programme in Applied Statistics again at the University of Florence, after a period at the Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge (USA); he then worked as a Research Fellow and then Temporary Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Sciences at University College London (UK). Gianluca's main interests are in Bayesian statistical modelling, with applications in economic evaluation and decision modelling (eg cost effectiveness analysis and decision-making problems in the health systems), hierarchical/multilevel models and causal inference using the decision-theoretic approach. Gianluca leads the Statistics for Health Economic Evaluation research group within the department of Statistical Science.