Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection Analysis of Soccer Players

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2021

Authors

António Mendes Lopes (Author) FEUP; José A. Tenreiro Machado (Author) Other

Journal

Title: Entropy

Vol. 23

Pages: 1-793

ISSN: 1099-4300

Publisher: MDPI

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 1 Citation

Scopus - 1 Citation

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00V-7FH

DOI: 10.3390/e23070793

Abstract (EN): In professional soccer, the choices made in forming a team lineup are crucial for achieving good results. Players are characterized by different skills and their relevance depends on the position that they occupy on the pitch. Experts can recognize similarities between players and their styles, but the procedures adopted are often subjective and prone to misclassification. The automatic recognition of players' styles based on their diversity of skills can help coaches and technical directors to prepare a team for a competition, to substitute injured players during a season, or to hire players to fill gaps created by teammates that leave. The paper adopts dimensionality reduction, clustering and computer visualization tools to compare soccer players based on a set of attributes. The players are characterized by numerical vectors embedding their particular skills and these objects are then compared by means of suitable distances. The intermediate data is processed to generate meaningful representations of the original dataset according to the (dis)similarities between the objects. The results show that the adoption of dimensionality reduction, clustering and visualization tools for processing complex datasets is a key modeling option with current computational resources.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 19