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Tennis, as one of the most popular individual sports in the world, holds an important role in the betting world. There are two main categories of bets: pre-match betting, which is conducted before the match starts, and live betting, which allows placing bets during the sporting event. Betting systems rely on setting sports odds, something historically done by domain experts. Setting odds for live betting represents a challenge due to the need to follow events in real-time and react accordingly. In tennis, hierarchical models often stand out as a popular choice when trying to predict the outcome of the match. These models commonly leverage a recursive approach that aims to predict the winner or the final score starting at any point in the match. However, recursive expressions inherently contain computational complexity which hinders the efficiency of methods relying on them. This paper proposes a more resource-effective alternative in the form of a combinatorial approach based on a binomial distribution. The resulting accuracy of the combinatorial approach is identical to that of the recursive approach while being vastly more efficient when considering the execution time, making it a superior choice for live betting in this domain.

ABSTRACTIn the last few decades sociologists were trying to explain human behaviour by analysing social networks, which requires access to data about interpersonal relationships. This represented a big obstacle in this research field until the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), which vastly facilitated the process of collecting such data. Nowadays, by crawling public profiles on OSNs, it is possible to build a social graph where “friends” on OSN become represented as connected nodes. OSN connection does not necessarily indicate a close real-life relationship, but using OSN interaction records may reveal real-life relationship intensities, a topic which inspired a number of recent researches. Still, published research currently lacks an extensive exploratory analysis of OSN interaction records, i.e. a comprehensive overview of users’ interaction via different ways of OSN interaction. In this paper, we provide such an overview by leveraging results of conducted extensive social experiment which managed to collect records for over 3200 Facebook users interacting with over 1,400,000 of their friends. Our exploratory analysis focuses on extracting population distributions and correlation parameters for 13 interaction parameters, providing valuable insight into OSN interaction for future researches aimed at this field of study.

Hierarchical clustering method is used to assign observations into clusters further connected to form a hierarchical structure. Observations in the same cluster are close together according to the predetermined distance measure, while observations belonging to different clusters are afar. This paper presents an implementation of specific distance measure used to calculate distances between observations which are described by a mixture of variable types. Data mining tool ‘Orange’ was used for implementation, testing, data processing and result visualization. Finally, a comparison was made between results obtained by using already available widget and the output of newly programmed widget which employs new variable types and new distance measure. The comparison was made on different well-known datasets.