Tactical behaviour in professional soccer:the secret of successful attacks

Soccer seems simple: "you just have to score one more goal than your opponent" (Johan Cruyf). The reality is a game of complex interactions between 22 players and a ball. Teammates have to coordinate their actions in space and time while continuously adapting to the opponent and the conditions of play: something we came to know as tactics. Until recently tactics were mainly analyzed by video-analysts who manually annotated interesting moments within a game to subsequently make qualitative assessments together with the coaching staff. Due to recent technological developments and scientific advancements a whole new era of tactical analysis opened up as during most professional games position tracking data of all players, referees and the ball is automatically collected nowadays. This results in datasets of millions of datapoints per match, that with the help of state of the art techniques from computer science and data science can be used for in depth analysis of tactical patterns. Building on the aforementioned developments, this thesis presents a body of research that aims to use data and state of the art techniques to gain in-depth insights in tactics, and to develop new analytical techniques for understanding determinants of success in attacking play. The result is a new methodology to identify key contributors and team-specific blue-prints for succes, and offers a new perspective on performance analysis in professional soccer

The role of elasticity in slab bending

International audiencePrevious studies showed that plate rheology exerts a dominant control on the shape and velocity of subducting plates. Here, we perform a systematic investigation of the role of elasticity in slab bending, using fully dynamic 2-D models where an elastic, viscoelastic, or viscoelastoplastic plate subducts freely into a purely viscous mantle. We derive a scaling relationship between the bending radius of viscoelastic slabs and the Deborah number, De, which is the ratio of Maxwell time over deformation time. We show that De controls the ratio of elastically stored energy over viscously dissipated energy and find that at De>10-2, substantially less energy is required to bend a viscoelastic slab to the same shape as a purely viscous slab with the same intrinsic viscosity. Elastically stored energy at higher De favors retreating modes of subduction via unbending, while trench advance only occurs for some cases with De 1, where most zones have low De 0.1. Slabs with De<10-2 either have very low viscosities or they may be yielding, in which case our De estimates may be underestimated by up to an order of magnitude, potentially pointing towards a significant role of elasticity in ∼60% of the subduction zones. In support of such a role of elasticity in subduction, we find that increasing De correlates with increasing proportion of larger seismic events in both instrumental and historic catalogues

Mesozoic spreading kinematics: consequences for Cenozoic Central and Western Mediterranean subduction

The highly complex tectonics of Central and Western Mediterranean subduction are well documented, but there is significant debate about the responsible dynamics. The motions of the main plates, Africa including Adria, Europe and Iberia, imposed initial and boundary conditions on the evolution of subduction that are often not considered. To quantitatively evaluate these conditions, we make a set of reconstructions from Mesozoic opening through Cenozoic closing of the Alpine Tethys, using main-plate kinematic data from several authors. Geologic and tectonic information are only added to constrain the location of the break-up boundary and a single plate-margin rearrangement at the end of the opening phase. Otherwise, the plates remain undeformed. This rigid-plate approach illustrates the context in which surface deformation and subduction occurred and provides estimates (with uncertainties) of the amount of material that should be accounted for in orogens or documented seismically in the mantle. Full tectonic reconstructions should satisfy such constraints. Opening led to alternating domains of predominantly oceanic lithosphere formed by normal spreading and domains dominated by transform motion, floored mainly by extended continental lithosphere. The transform domain structures provide logical decoupling zones to allow Penninic, Ligurian and Pyrenean basins to start subducting independently. The complex buoyancy in the transform domain linking Ligurian and Penninic basins, and obliquity between directions of opening and closing may account for a number of the oceanic basins and continental slivers often invoked to explain Alpine geology. The significant proportion of continental lithosphere in the Alboran would have favoured delamination of mantle lithosphere over subduction. The almost completely subducted Penninic slab obstructed subduction of the Ligurian domain in the direction of Africa-Europe convergence, possibly forcing the rollback of the Appeninic/Calabrian trenc

Predicting match outcome in professional Dutch football using tactical performance metrics computed from position tracking data

Quality as well as quantity of tracking data have rapidly increased over the recent years, and multiple leagues have programs for league-wide collection of tracking data. Tracking data enables in-depth performance analysis, especially with regard to tactics. This already resulted in the development of several Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) related to scoring opportunities, outplaying defenders, numerical balance and territorial advantage. Although some of these KPI’s have gained popularity in the analytics community, little research has been conducted to support the link with performance. Therefore, we aim to study the relationship between match outcome and tactical KPI’s derived from tracking data. Our dataset contains tracking data of all players and the ball, and match outcome, for 118 Dutch premier league matches. Using tracking data, we identified 72.989 passes. For every pass-reception window we computed KPI’s related to numerical superiority, outplayed defenders, territorial gains and scoring opportunities using position data. This individual data was then aggregated over a full match. We then split the dataset in a train and test set, and predicted match outcome using different combinations of features in a logistic regression model. KPI’s related to a combination of off-the-ball features seemed to be the best predictor of match outcome (accuracy of 64.0% and a log loss of 0.67), followed by KPI’s related to the creation of scoring opportunities (accuracy of 58% and a log loss of 0.69). This indicates that although most (commercially) available KPI’s are based on ball-events, the most important information seems to be in off-the-ball activity. We have demonstrated that tactical KPI’s computed from tracking data are relatively good predictors of match outcome. As off-the-ball activity seems to be the main predictor of match outcome, tracking data seems to provide much more insight than notational analysis

Buffalo Sensory Analysis of Meat in the City of Medellin, Colombia, South America

The aim of this study was to determine the organoleptic properties of meat buffaloes in the town of Medellin, Colombia. It was a methodology employed with satisfaction hedonic scale of five-point verbal. GLM method was employed, with the technical MANOVA, with the orthogonal contrasts canonical, determining the dimensionality, in that the response variables were expressed by the criterion of maximum likelihood. The analysis was complemented through the technique of Spearman, using the SAS statistical package version 9.0. In making, the MANOVA, for the response variables smell, taste, tact and general appearance of the product found no statistical differences (p&gt; 0.05). However, the variables above presented statistical relationship (p &lt;0.05), when the ANOVA analysis for each gender. The Spearman correlation coefficient showed that there are significant correlations between the different responses, for both men and women. This result indicates that the meat buffaloes, will present a good acceptance by the general public and therefore an acceptable marketing in the city of Medellin

Determinação de características químicas, físico-químicas e propriedades funcionais de carne de caprinos do Nordeste brasileiro.

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Modelling team performance in soccer using tactical features derived from position tracking data

Decision-makers in soccer routinely assess the tactical behaviour of a team and its opponents both during and after the game to optimize performance. Currently, this assessment is typically driven by notational analysis and observation. Therefore, potential high-impact decisions are often made based on limited or even biased information. With the current study, we aimed to quantitatively assess tactical performance by abstracting a set of spatiotemporal features from the general offensive principles of play in soccer using position tracking data, and to train a machine learning classifier to predict match outcome based on these features computed over the full game as well as only parts of the game. Based on the results of these analyses, we describe a proof of concept of a decision support system for coaches and managers. In an analysis of 302 professional Dutch Eredivisie matches, we were able to train a Linear Discriminant Analysis model to predict match outcome with fair to good (74.1%) accuracy with features computed over the full match, and 67.9% accuracy with features computed over only 1/4th of the match. We therefore conclude that using only position tracking data, we can provide valuable feedback to coaches about how their team is executing the various principles of play, and how these principles are contributing to overall performance

A 1.2 V Low-Noise-Amplifier with Double Feedback for High Gain and Low Noise Figure

Part 19: Electronics: AmplifiersInternational audienceIn this paper we present a balun low noise amplifier (LNA) in which the gain is boosted using a double feedback structure. The circuit is based in a conventional Balun LNA with noise and distortion cancellation. The LNA is based in two basic stages: common-gate (CG) and common-source (CS). We propose to replace the resistors by active loads, which have two inputs that will be used to provide the feedback (in the CG and CS stages). This proposed methodology will boost the gain and reduce the NF. Simulation results, with a 130 nm CMOS technology, show that the gain is 23.8 dB and the NF is less than 1.8 dB. The total power dissipation is only 5.3(since no extra blocks are required), leading to an FOM of 5.7 mW− 1 from a nominal 1.2 supply

Interaction of subducted slabs with the mantle transition-zone: A regime diagram from 2-D thermo-mechanical models with a mobile trench and an overriding plate

Transition zone slab deformation influences Earth's thermal, chemical, and tectonic evolution. However, the mechanisms responsible for the wide range of imaged slab morphologies remain debated. Here we use 2-D thermo-mechanical models with a mobile trench, an overriding plate, a temperature and stress-dependent rheology, and a 10, 30, or 100-fold increase in lower mantle viscosity, to investigate the effect of initial subducting and overriding-plate ages on slab-transition zone interaction. Four subduction styles emerge: (i) a "vertical folding" mode, with a quasi-stationary trench, near-vertical subduction, and buckling/folding at depth (VF); (ii) slabs that induce mild trench retreat, which are flattened/"horizontally deflected" and stagnate at the upper-lower mantle interface (HD); (iii) inclined slabs, which result from rapid sinking and strong trench retreat (ISR); (iv) a two-stage mode, displaying backward-bent and subsequently inclined slabs, with late trench retreat (BIR). Transitions from regime (i) to (iii) occur with increasing subducting plate age (i.e., buoyancy and strength). Regime (iv) develops for old (strong) subducting and overriding plates. We find that the interplay between trench motion and slab deformation at depth dictates the subduction style, both being controlled by slab strength, which is consistent with predictions from previous compositional subduction models. However, due to feedbacks between deformation, sinking rate, temperature, and slab strength, the subducting plate buoyancy, overriding plate strength, and upper-lower mantle viscosity jump are also important controls in thermo-mechanical subduction. For intermediate upper-lower mantle viscosity jumps (×30), our regimes reproduce the diverse range of seismically imaged slab morphologies

Resolution learning in deep convolutional networks using scale-space theory

Resolution in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is typically bounded by the receptive field size through filter sizes, and subsampling layers or strided convolutions on feature maps. The optimal resolution may vary significantly depending on the dataset. Modern CNNs hard-code their resolution hyper-parameters in the network architecture which makes tuning such hyper-parameters cumbersome. We propose to do away with hard-coded resolution hyper-parameters and aim to learn the appropriate resolution from data. We use scale-space theory to obtain a self-similar parametrization of filters and make use of the N-Jet: a truncated Taylor series to approximate a filter by a learned combination of Gaussian derivative filters. The parameter sigma of the Gaussian basis controls both the amount of detail the filter encodes and the spatial extent of the filter. Since sigma is a continuous parameter, we can optimize it with respect to the loss. The proposed N-Jet layer achieves comparable performance when used in state-of-the art architectures, while learning the correct resolution in each layer automatically. We evaluate our N-Jet layer on both classification and segmentation, and we show that learning sigma is especially beneficial for inputs at multiple sizes