Complex Network Analysis of Men Single ATP Tennis Matches

During the last decades Network Science field has been rediscovered and addressed as the "new science" [2], [3]. A lot of issues have been (re-)examined thanks to Network Science techniques, which are nowadays permeating the way we face the world as a unique interconnected component. The presence and the immediate availability of a huge amount of digital data describing every kind of network and the way in which its nodes interact, has made possible an interdisciplinary analysis of many large-scale systems. Similar techniques have been recently applied also to professional sports, in order to discover complex interactions phenomena and universal rules which are almost invisible and difficult to recognize restricting the attention to small networks or to microscopic level. For example, complexnetwork analysis were conducted on soccer (e.g. in [4] and [5]), football ([6] and [7]), basket ([8] and [9]), baseball ([10]) and cricket ([11] and [12]), just to name a few. In professional tennis as well, there are few studies examining how to map matches into complex networks and then developing new ranking methods alternative to the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) official one. The first work of this kind is represented by [13], where the authors explained the network generation and then they performed some simple analysis on single Grand Slams tournaments matches only (i.e.