3.2 Home-field Advantage

To examine whether there exists a home-field advantage at the Olympics, we will first use a scatter plot with jitter. The x-axis will be countries that have ever been a host, and the y-axis will be the percentage against the total number of medals a country earned. Each dot represents an Olympic Games the country has participated in. Black dots denote data for a “non-host” year and orange dots denote data for host year. See Figure 3.5.

To better show the density distribution of medal gains, we will employ kernel density estimation in a small multiple. The x-axis will be the percentage against the total number of medals at a Games and the y-axis will be density. We will use an arrow to denote the density of a year when the country was a host. See Figure 3.6.

Arrows located at points with high densities, would be signs of the existence of home-field advantage at the Olympics.

Figure 3.5: Scatter plot with jittering for home-field advantage

Figure 3.6: KDE for home-field advantage