Region-wise Ranking of Sports Players Based on Link Fusion

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Players are ranked in various sports to show their importance over other players. Existing methods only consider intra-type links (e.g., player to player and team to team), but ignore inter-type links (e.g., one type of player to another type of player, such as batsman to bowler and player to team) based on cognitive aspects. They also ignore the spatiality of the players. There is a strong relationship among players and their teams, which can be represented as a network consisting of multi-type interrelated objects. In this paper, we propose a players' ranking method, called Region-wise Players Link Fusion (RPLF) which is applied to the sport of cricket. RPLF considers players' region-wise intra-type and inter-type relation-based features to rank the players. Considering multi-type interrelated objects is based on the intuition that a batsman scoring high against top bowlers of a strong team or a bowler taking wickets against top batsmen of a strong team is considered as a good player. The experimental results show that RPLF provides promising insights of players' rankings. RLFP is a generic method and can be applied to different sports for ranking players.