Home // DATA ANALYTICS 2012, The First International Conference on Data Analytics // View article
Authors:
Ali Jarvandi
Shahram Sarkani
Thomas Mazzuchi
Keywords: Markov Modeling; Decision Process; Sports; Simulation
Abstract:
Player selection is one of the great challenges of professional soccer clubs. Despite extensive use of performance data, a large number of player transfers at the highest level of club soccer have less than satisfactory outcome. This paper proposes a Semi-Markov Decision Process framework to model the dependencies between players in a team and its effects on individual and team performance. The study uses data from the English Premier League to artificially replace players in their prospective teams and approximate the outcome using a simulation. A comparison between the expected and actual performance determines the goodness of the model. In early experiments, the output of the model has correctly identified the trend changes in scoring and conceding goals and provided a high correlation with actual performance.
Pages: 80 to 82
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012
Publication date: September 23, 2012
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4464
ISBN: 978-1-61208-242-4
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Dates: from September 23, 2012 to September 28, 2012