Context based adoption of ranking and indexing measures for cricket team ranks

Abstract

There is an international cricket governing body that ranks the expertise of all the cricket playing nations, known as the International Cricket Council (ICC). The ranking system followed by the ICC relies on the winnings and defeats of the teams. The model used by the ICC to implement rankings is deficient in certain key respects. It ignores key factors like winning margin and strength of the opposition. Various measures of the ranking concept are presented in this research. The proposed methods adopt the concepts of h-Index and PageRank for presenting more comprehensive ranking metrics. The proposed approaches not only rank the teams on their losing/winning stats but also take into consideration the margin of winning and the quality of the opposition. Three cricket team ranking techniques are presented i.e., (1) Cricket Team-Index (ct-index), (2) Cricket Team Rank (CTR) and (3) Weighted Cricket Team Rank (WCTR). The proposed metrics are validated through the collection of cricket dataset, extracted from Cricinfo, having instances for all the three formats of the game i.e., T20 International (T20i), One Day International (ODI) and Test matches. The comparative analysis between the proposed and existing techniques, for all the three formats, is presented as well.