The debate of who is the pound for pound best fighter in mixed martial arts is often brought up after some of the world’s greatest fighters compete. However, how does one rank fighters who have never competed against each other and most likely never will? Win/loss records are often used to compare fighters but more often than not, these types of debates are quite subjective. David Coelho, a software architect, used social network analysis in an attempt to answer the question of who is pound for pound, the best fighter in the world.
In Coelho’s network, fighters were nodes and directed edges represented their fights. Nodes with edges pointing to them meant that they won their match against the other nodes. The figure below is an example of how the network looked.
After creating the network, Coelho used Page Rank to determine who the best pound for pound fighter was for each gender. In CSCC46, the class was taught to think of Page Rank as a circulating fluid between nodes. In Coelho’s social network analysis, he thought of Page Rank as the relevancy of fighters that would get passed from one fighter to the next, depending on whether the fighter lost or won their fight. Fighters that won would receive the losing fighter’s relevancy and thus increasing their own. Coelho adjusted the Page Rank algorithm to account for fighters losing relevance when they lost fights. The figure below displays how the network looks when including the Page Rank algorithm. As you can see, relevancy pools up on the most successful fighters.
What interested me to read and explore this article was how the author was able to use social network analysis to answer one of the most subjective questions, about one of my favourite sports. Perhaps one day, social network analysis can be seen as the most credible tool to rank the greatest fighters in the world. For those curious fight fans, the tables below display who Coehlo’s social network analysis determined as the best pound for pound male and female fighters in the world.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/network-science-analysis-history-mma-david-coelho/