62: Going for Gold: Using Record Linkage to Predict Winning Gymnasts at the 2024 Paris Olympics

Music City Center 

Athletes who compete in the Olympic Games participate in many other competitions leading up to the games event, and scores in these competitions are possible tools to use to predict Olympic performance. However, at each competition the name of a gymnast is not always perfectly recorded, as nicknames and other variants of names are often used. In this project, we use record linkage to identify gymnasts in data from 2022 and 2023 international competitions. We propose an adaptation to the Jaro-Winkler Similarity score based on the specific discrepancies in names in this dataset and we then use Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling on the linked data to predict winning gymnasts in Women's Artistic Gymnastics.

Record Linkage

Gymnastics

Olympics

Jaro-Winkler

Bayesian 

Section on Statistics in Sports