Statistical Methods for Evaluating Hot Hand Effects in Golf Tournaments

Golf tournaments occur on a near weekly basis, on different courses with different degrees of difficulty. Within these tournaments players compete against all the others to finish first by taking the lowest number of shots, and often there are theories around player’s being on a good run of form (a hot hand). A recent paper by Baker and McHale (2022) “‘Form is temporary, class is permanent’: identifying a longer-term hot hand in golf” propose a method for modelling these supposed hot hands through an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process.