An empirical Bayes' procedure for ranking players in Ryder Cup golf

We describe a model to obtain strengths and rankings of players appearing in golf's Ryder Cup. Obtaining rankings is complicated because of two reasons. First, competitors do not compete on an equal number of occasions, with some competitors appearing too infrequently for their ranking to be estimated with any degree of certainty, and second, different competitors experience different levels of volatility in results. Our approach is to assume the competitor strengths are drawn from some common distribution. For small numbers of competitors, as is the case here, we fit the model using Monte-Carlo integration. Results suggest there is very little difference between the top performing players, though Scotland's Colin Montgomerie is estimated as the strongest Ryder Cup player.