Related papers: Better Prevent than Tackle: Valuing Defense in Soc…
Objectively quantifying the value of player actions in football (soccer) is a challenging problem. To date, studies in football analytics have mainly focused on the attacking side of the game, while there has been less work on event-driven…
Estimation of football players' skills is one of the key tasks in sports analytics. This paper introduces multiple extensions to a widely used model, expected possession value (EPV), to address some key challenges such as selection problem.…
The expected possession value (EPV) of a soccer possession represents the likelihood of a team scoring or receiving the next goal at any time instance. By decomposing the EPV into a series of subcomponents that are estimated separately, we…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
Scientifically evaluating soccer players represents a challenging Machine Learning problem. Unfortunately, most existing answers have very opaque algorithm training procedures; relevant data are scarcely accessible and almost impossible to…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
Action spotting in soccer videos is the task of identifying the specific time when a certain key action of the game occurs. Lately, it has received a large amount of attention and powerful methods have been introduced. Action spotting…
A counterattack in soccer is a high speed, high intensity direct attack that can occur when a team transitions from a defensive state to an attacking state after regaining possession of the ball. The aim is to create a goal-scoring…
Traditional assessments of tackling in American Football often only consider the number of tackles made, without adequately accounting for their context and importance for the game. Aiming for improvement, we develop a metric that…
We present a fully convolutional neural network architecture that is capable of estimating full probability surfaces of potential passes in soccer, derived from high-frequency spatiotemporal data. The network receives layers of low-level…
Soccer analytics rely on two data sources: the player positions on the pitch and the sequences of events they perform. With around 2000 ball events per game, their precise and exhaustive annotation based on a monocular video stream remains…
Analysis of invasive sports such as soccer is challenging because the game situation changes continuously in time and space, and multiple agents individually recognize the game situation and make decisions. Previous studies using deep…
The massive growth of data collection in sports has opened numerous avenues for professional teams and media houses to gain insights from this data. The data collected includes per frame player and ball trajectories, and event annotations…
Soccer is a sparse rewarding game: any smart or careless action in critical situations can change the result of the match. Therefore players, coaches, and scouts are all curious about the best action to be performed in critical situations,…
Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…
Analyzing defenses in team sports is generally challenging because of the limited event data. Researchers have previously proposed methods to evaluate football team defense by predicting the events of ball gain and being attacked using…
Tackling is a fundamental defensive move in American football, with the main purpose of stopping the forward motion of the ball-carrier. However, current tackling metrics are manually recorded outcomes that are inherently flawed due to…
Graph neural network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more…
Predicting outcomes in sports is important for teams, leagues, bettors, media, and fans. Given the growing amount of player tracking data, sports analytics models are increasingly utilizing spatially-derived features built upon player…
Graph deep learning models, such as graph convolutional networks (GCN) achieve remarkable performance for tasks on graph data. Similar to other types of deep models, graph deep learning models often suffer from adversarial attacks. However,…