Bayesian analysis of home advantage in North American professional sports before and during COVID-19.

ABSTRACT: Home advantage in professional sports is a widely accepted phenomenon despite the lack of any controlled experiments at the professional level. The return to play of professional sports during the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to analyze the hypothesized effect of home advantage in neutral settings. While recent work has examined the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on home advantage in European football, comparatively few studies have examined the effect of restrictions in the North American professional sports leagues. In this work, we infer the effect of and changes in home advantage prior to and during COVID-19 in the professional North American leagues for hockey, basketball, baseball, and American football. We propose a Bayesian multi-level regression model that infe

SUBMITTER: Higgs N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8282683 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature