Keynote
Speakers
Keynote Session on AI Speaker
Vice President of Hockey Strategy and Research, Buffalo Sabres
Sam Ventura is the Vice President of Hockey Strategy and Research for the Buffalo Sabres, and an affiliated faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science. He also serves as an advisory board member for the University of Pittsburgh’s MS in Quantitative Economics program. Prior to that, he was the Director of Hockey Operations and Director of Hockey Research for the Pittsburgh Penguins; a professor of Statistics at CMU, where he also received his PhD (Statistics, 2015); an assistant coach for Carnegie Mellon’s ice hockey team; and faculty advisor to the CMU Sports Analytics Club. Sam has co-authored multiple R packages for open-source data collection and analysis, including nhlscrapr, nflscrapR, and spew, and he co-founded war-on-ice.com. He co-organizes the annual Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference. His current research interests include evaluating in-game athlete decision-making, optimizing human athletic performance, and objective decision-making for professional sports front offices.
Lauren is an engineer on ESPN’s industry-leading Sports Analytics team. She and the team create analytical storytelling tools, like the Football and Basketball Power Index ratings used across collegiate and professional sports, and develop products and experiences to support insightful and innovative storytelling. Before moving to Connecticut to work at ESPN in 2013, the Oklahoma native and University of Oklahoma mathematics graduate started her career by blending her love of sports and numbers as a high school math teacher and coach. While at OU, she represented on the sidelines with the pom squad allowing her to experience memorable sports moments from the sidelines. Lauren and her husband, John, live in Connecticut with their dog, Watson.
2026 CMSAC Workshop:
Was It the Player or the Team? Building a Bayesian Skill Model for Soccer, Live in PyMC
Alexandre Andorra
DESCRIPTION:
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The session will be recorded as a live episode of Learning Bayesian Statistics.
Imagine you're watching the World Cup. The French striker ended the tournament with 10 goals, while the one from Cabo Verde scored 4. Who is actually better?
Raw statistics can't answer that, because they mix a player's own ability with the team around them. Answering it properly means building a model that can imagine a world that never happened -- one where both players wore the same shirt.
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In this session, we'll build a model that can, live in PyMC, from scratch. We'll start with a simple model of goal-scoring and uncertainty, add Gaussian processes so that form can rise and fall across a career, and then add team factors that strip out context to leave individual skill behind.
We'll finish with the question that matters most: does it actually work? We'll look at out-of-sample validation, and at a cautionary tale from our own model search -- a variant that gained points in-sample but lost under cross-validation.
No Bayesian background needed. If you've fitted a regression, you'll be able to follow. Notebooks provided, no setup required.
Paper: Unveiling True Talent: The Soccer Factor Model for Skill Evaluation (Andorra & Göbel, 2024), arXiv:2412.05911
Live platform: https://www.soccerfactormodel.com
By registering for and participating in this workshop, you acknowledge that this workshop will be audio and video recorded for use in the Learning Bayesian Statistics podcast without compensation or further approval.
Location
Conference Location
The CMSAConference will be held in Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon University, providing a dynamic setting for collaboration and learning. Join us in this vibrant environment to immerse yourself in the world of sports analytics.
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Hotels & Lodging
The CMSAC 2026 hotel block is at the Hilton Garden Inn Pittsburgh University Place. Click the link below to reserve your room.
​If you are in need of additional lodging, please refer to the following hotels in the area:
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Springhill Suites in Bakery Square
Sheraton Pittsburgh Airport Hotel
Courtyard by Marriott Pittsburgh Airport
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh Airport
Hampton Inn & Suites Pittsburgh/Waterfront-West Homestead
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*Please note that there is no designated hotel block at any of these locations and pricing cannot be guaranteed
