Markov Decision Processes and ARIMA models to analyze and predict Ice Hockey player’s performance

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, player’s performance on ice hockey is modelled to create newmetricsby match and season for players. AD-trees have been used to summarize ice hockey matches using state variables, which combine context and action variables to estimate the impact of each action under that specific state using Markov Decision Processes. With that, an impact measure has been described and four player metrics have been derived by match for regular seasons 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. General analysis has been performed for these metrics and ARIMA models have been used to analyze and predict players performance. The best prediction achieved in the modelling is the mean of the previous matches. The combination of several metrics including the ones created in this thesis could be combined to evaluate player’s performance using salary ranges to indicate whether a player is worth hiring/maintaining/firing