A Fairness Audit of the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method: Format-Specific and Gender-Differential Bias, with an Interpretable Calibration Layer for Cricket Target Revision

The researchers conducted a large-scale audit of the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method widely used in international cricket matches and found that the algorithm had format-specific biases and gender differences. Data showed that in women’s first-base matches, the DLS method averaged a 7.63-point overestimation of scores. To address this issue, the research team generated a dataset containing 233,550 synthetic scenarios based on Cricsheet data and compared it with five modern alternative models. Finally, they proposed a lightweight calibration layer called DLS-Cal, which consists of 27K parameters. This module significantly reduced the absolute deviation in women’s first-base matches from +6.19 points to +0.65 points, while maintaining the original calibration effect for men’s matches.