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Record W4410044215 · doi:10.1515/jqas-2024-0083

NHL aging curves using functional principal component analysis

2025· article· en· W4410044215 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Inference
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPrincipal component analysisFunctional principal component analysisComponent (thermodynamics)Statistical physicsMathematicsStatisticsBiological systemComputer sciencePhysicsBiologyThermodynamics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract When considering future performance in sport, age is an important feature for prediction models. On average, players tend to improve from their rookie (earliest) season, plateau, and then decline in performance until they retire from the league. In this paper we apply Functional Principal Component Analysis to the careers of players from the National Hockey League in order to construct individual aging curves. The approach is nonparametric in the sense that a parametric structure is not imposed on the aging curves. A main aspect of our work is the consideration of selection bias whereby players who have long careers are not randomly sampled but tend to be exceptional players. Whereas the literature constructs aging curves that represent the average player, we produce aging curves for individual players; this is particularly useful in roster construction.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.293
Threshold uncertainty score0.569

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.005
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.175
GPT teacher head0.459
Teacher spread0.284 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it