HSyE graduate student Kyle Cunningham Finalist in MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Paper Contest
Kyle Cunningham, a graduate student at Northeastern University’s Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute, co-authored the research paper, “Alleviating Competitive Imbalances in NFL Schedules: An Integer-Programming Approach.” Through analytics and statistics, Kyle showed how some teams in the NFL end up playing more games against teams coming off a bye than other teams do. That imbalance results in some teams competing against rested players more often than others. Kyle addressed this problem by creating a programming model which factors in bye weeks, Thursday games, and home and away streaks. The result was a model even better than the NFL’s for determining a competitive balance. The paper was one of eight finalists for the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference’s research paper of the year.