Analysis of home advantage in sportsKulenović, Timur (Avtor) Demšar, Jure (Mentor) home advantagefootballbasketballBayesian statisticsdata scienceHome advantage is a phenomenon observed in sports where teams tend to perform better when playing in their home environment compared to playing away from home. In this work, we addressed home advantage in professional basketball and football leagues, focusing on five top-level leagues in each sport. Our goal was to quantify home advantage and compare it between the leagues. An important part of our work was the collection and careful curation of datasets, which we made publicly available for broader research applications. A novel metric was proposed to measure home advantage at the individual game level, differentiating it from conventional season-based metrics. To quantify home advantage and the uncertainty surrounding it, we utilized Bayesian hierarchical models. Our results suggest that in basketball the ABA league displayed the highest degree of home advantage, while NBA had the lowest degree of home advantage. In football, four of the leagues yielded similar results, whereas La Liga showed significantly higher levels of home advantage. Seasonal trends were also explored. For some leagues, we observed lower home advantage in the seasons affected by COVID-19. Additionally, the study investigated the connection between potential factors and home advantage, for this purpose we utilized the proposed home advantage metric. The crowd attendance is mainly positively correlated and the referee bias is often negatively correlated with home advantage but the results differ between the leagues. Nevertheless, we highlight the existence of unexplored factors that could substantially contribute to home advantage.20232023-12-06 09:50:00Magistrsko delo/naloga152755VisID: 35334COBISS_ID: 177579523sl