multielo

This package implements a multiplayer extension of the popular Elo rating system.

• Installation
• Example Usage
• Methodology
  • Traditional Elo ratings
  • Extension to multiplayer

For additional information, see the blog post on Towards Data Science (or try this link if you hit a paywall).

Installation

The package can be installed from GitHub with using pip.

pip install git+https://github.com/djcunningham0/multielo.git

You can install a specific released version of the package using tag names. For example, to install release v0.1.0 you can use:

pip install git+https://github.com/djcunningham0/[email protected]

Example Usage

The following example shows how to calculate updated Elo ratings after a matchup using the default settings in the package.

from multielo import MultiElo
import numpy as np

elo = MultiElo()

# player with 1200 rating beats a player with 1000 rating
elo.get_new_ratings(np.array([1200, 1000]))
#  array([1207.68809835,  992.31190165])

# player with 900 rating beats player with 1000 rating
elo.get_new_ratings(np.array([900, 1000]))
#  array([920.48207999, 979.51792001])

# 3-way matchup
elo.get_new_ratings(np.array([1200, 900, 1000]))
#  array([1208.34629612,  910.43382278,  981.21988111])

See demo.ipynb for a more in-depth tutorial, including details on parameters that can be tuned in the Elo algorithm and examples of how to use the Tracker and Player objects to keep track of Elo ratings for a group of players over time.

Methodology

Note: This multiplayer extension isn't very mathematically or statistically rigorous. It seems to work reasonably well, but I don't think the rating values are as interpretable as traditional Elo. Send me a note or open an issue if you have ideas for improving the methodology.

Traditional Elo ratings

Traditional Elo ratings only apply to 1-on-1 matchups. The new ratings for the players involved in a matchup are calculated from:

1. The initial ratings before the matchup.
2. The matchup result.

There are also a few parameters that must be set for an Elo rating system:

1. K controls how many Elo rating points are gained or lost in a single game. Larger K results in larger changes after each matchup. A commonly used value is K = 32.
2. D controls the estimated win probability of each player. A commonly used value is D = 400, which means that a player with a 200-point Elo advantage is expected to win ~75% of the time. A smaller D value means the player with the higher Elo rating has a higher estimated win probability.

Suppose we have two players, A and B, with initial ratings R_A and R_B, respectively. We calculate an "expected score" for each player according to those ratings. The expected score for player A is:

and the expected score for player B is defined similarly.

To calculate the players' new ratings, we compare these expected scores with the "actual scores", or the matchup result. The actual score for player A is:

Then the new rating for player A, R'_A, is calculated from the initial rating, expected score, and actual score:

Extension to multiplayer

At minimum, a reasonable extension of Elo to multiplayer matchups should have the following properties:

1. Changes in ratings should be zero sum, just like traditional Elo.
2. Coming in first place is better (improves your rating more) than coming in second place, is better than third place, and so on. Losing (coming in last place) cannot improve your rating.
3. It should converge to traditional Elo when there are only two players in the matchup.

Expected scores

The first issue we must address is that the Elo expected score calculation only involves the ratings of two players. In order to generalize this calculation to multiplayer matchups, we can treat a single multiplayer matchup as a combination set of all pairwise 1-on-1 matchups between every player involved. Specifically, in a multiplayer matchup with N players there would be

pairwise 1-on-1 matchups between the players.

To calculate each player's expected score for the multiplayer matchup, first we calculate that player's expected score for each individual matchup just as with traditional Elo. Then we scale the scores by N(N-1)/2 so that the expected scores for all players sum to 1 (the expected scores are meant to represent probabilities so they must sum to 1).

The full expression for the expected score for player A in a multiplayer matchup with N players is:

Actual scores

The "actual scores" in traditional are binary: 1 point for a win, 0 for a loss. In a multiplayer matchup there are more than two options, so we need a different definition for actual scores. We can introduce the idea of a "score function", where the actual score for player A is given by:

This scoring function should have a few properties:

1. The scores must sum to 1 to match the expected scores.
2. The scores should be monotonically decreasing. That is, 1st place should have a higher score than 2nd, which has a higher score than 3rd, and so on.
3. Last place should have a score of 0 because a last-place finish should never improve a player's rating.

Note that when there are only two players, the only score function that satisfies all three conditions is the binary definition.

With more than two players, there are many possible score functions that satisfy all three conditions. Perhaps the most natural score function is what is defined in this implementation as a linear score function:

where N is the number of players and p_A is the place that player A finishes in (1 for first place, 2 for second, and so on). For example, with five players, the actual scores awarded to the players in order of finish are [0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1, 0]. When using the linear score function, each improvement in place is weighted equally. That is, improving from second to first has the same impact to the player's actual score as improving from third to second, and so on.

In some cases it may be of interest to give more value to the top finishers. For example, in a poker game where only the top three finishers are paid out, it may be optimal for players to take risks that improve their chances of coming in first place rather than minimizing their chance of finishing in last. That is, players will try to finish at the top, but there is very little real-world difference in finishing in last rather than second-to-last. One solution to these cases is to use what is defined in this implementation as an exponential score function:

where N is the number of players, p_A is the place that player A finishes in, and is the "base" of the score function. When , this score function places extra weight on finishing in the top places. For example, when and there are five players, the actual scores awarded to the players in order of finish are approximately [0.496, 0.290, 0.153, 0.061, 0]. A larger value increases the benefit to finishing in the top places.

The chart below shows how three different score functions would assign actual scores in a 5-player matchup.

It is also worth noting that as approaches 1, the exponential score function converges to the linear score function.

The value in the exponential score function corresponds to the score_function_base parameter of the MultiElo object in this package.

Calculating new ratings

The new rating calculation is very similar to traditional Elo. We compare the actual and expected scores for a player, scale that difference by a constant factor, and then add it to the player's initial rating. The only difference is that rather than scaling by K, for a matchup with N players we scale by K times N-1. That is,

The additional scaling by N-1 isn't completely necessary if every matchup always has the same number of players -- in that case we could simply use a larger value of K. But in a scenario where some matchups have different number of players, it is important to have larger Elo rating changes in larger matchups. For example, 1st place in a 10-player matchup should result in a larger rating increase than 1st place in a 5-player matchup. Scaling by the number of players accomplishes this.

Ties

As of version 0.3.0, this Elo implementation handles ties (for both standard and multiplayer Elo). See demo.ipynb for syntax.

The only difference in calculation is that the actual scores are averaged between all players who tied. In standard Elo this means both players receive an actual score of 0.5. In multiplayer Elo, the exact actual scores depend on the scoring function and number of players.