Predicting wins, losses and attributes' sensitivities in the soccer World Cup 2018 using neural network analysis

Predicting the results of soccer competitions and the contributions of match attributes, in particular, has gained popularity in recent years. Big data processing obtained from different sensors, cameras and analysis systems needs modern tools that can provide a deep understanding of the relationship between this huge amount of data produced by sensors and cameras, both linear and non-linear data. Using data mining tools does not appear sufficient to provide a deep understanding of the relationship between the match attributes and results and how to predict or optimize the results based upon performance variables. This study aimed to suggest a different approach to predict wins, losses and attributes' sensitivities which enables the prediction of match results based on the most sensitive attributes that affect it as a second step. A radial basis function neural network model has successfully weighted the effectiveness of all match attributes and classified the team results into the target groups as a win or loss. The neural network model's output demonstrated a correct percentage of win and loss of 83.3% and 72.7% respectively, with a low Root Mean Square training error of 2.9% and testing error of 0.37%. Out of 75 match attributes, 19 were identified as powerful predictors of success. The most powerful respectively were: the Total Team Medium Pass Attempted (MBA) 100%; the Distance Covered Team Average in zone 3 (15-20 km/h; Zone3_TA) 99%; the Team Average ball delivery into the attacking third of the field (TA_DAT) 80.9%; the Total Team Covered Distance without Ball Possession (Not in_Poss_TT) 76.8%; and the Average Distance Covered by Team (Game TA) 75.1%. Therefore, the novel radial based function neural network model can be employed by sports scientists to adapt training, tactics and opposition analysis to improve performance

Predicting college basketball match outcomes using machine learning techniques: some results and lessons learned

Most existing work on predicting NCAAB matches has been developed in a statistical context. Trusting the capabilities of ML techniques, particularly classification learners, to uncover the importance of features and learn their relationships, we evaluated a number of different paradigms on this task. In this paper, we summarize our work, pointing out that attributes seem to be more important than models, and that there seems to be an upper limit to predictive quality

The collection, analysis and exploitation of footballer attributes: A systematic review

© 2022 – The authors. Published by IOS Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0)There is growing on-going research into how footballer attributes, collected prior to, during and post-match, may address the demands of clubs, media pundits and gaming developers. Focusing upon individual player performance analysis and prediction, we examined the body of research which considers different player attributes. This resulted in the selection of 132 relevant papers published between 1999 and 2020. From these we have compiled a comprehensive list of player attributes, categorising them as static, such as age and height, or dynamic, such as pass completions and shots on target. To indicate their accuracy, we classified each attribute as objectively or subjectively derived, and finally by their implied accessibility and their likely personal and club sensitivity. We assigned these attributes to 25 logical groups such as passing, tackling and player demographics. We analysed the relative research focus on each group and noted the analytical methods deployed, identifying which statistical or machine learning techniques were used. We reviewed and considered the use of character trait attributes in the selected papers and discuss more formal approaches to their use. Based upon this we have made recommendations on how this work may be developed to support elite clubs in the consideration of transfer targets.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Dirichlet belief networks for topic structure learning

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.Comment: accepted in NIPS 201

Predicting soccer outcome with machine learning based on weather condition

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesMassive amounts of research have been doing on predicting soccer matches using machine learning algorithms. Unfortunately, there are no prior researches used weather condition as features. In this thesis, three different classification algorithms were investigated for predicting the outcomes of soccer matches by using temperature difference, rain precipitation, and several other historical match statistics as features. The dataset consists of statistic information of soccer matches in La Liga and Segunda division from season 2013-2014 to 2016-2017 and weather information in every host cities. The results show that the SVM model has better accuracy score for predicting the full-time result compare to KNN and RF with 45.32% for temperature difference below 5° and 49.51% for temperature difference above 5°. For over/under 2.5 goals, SVM also has better accuracy with 53.07% for rain precipitation below 5 mm and 56% for rain precipitation above 5 mm

Application of Affective Lexicons in Sports Text Mining: a Case Study of FIFA World Cup 2018

World Cup is a major football event that is globally popular and has its very best influence on human emotions. As such, it affects how people verbally discuss football topics on the Internet. In addition, it shows great significance when viewers who usually do not watch other football competitions start paying close attention when their nation plays a World Cup football match. In this paper, fans’ online behaviour during World Cup 2018 was analysed using text mining methods. With the use of emotion analysis, it is noticed that there are different emotional states through which people go while sharing their thoughts with other people about football. Reddit, a discussion Internet website, was used as a generator of user data. Five supervised machine learning algorithms were used to test and revise an existing model. It is affirmed that the model successfully predicts the emotions within the text with an average accuracy of 78%