A Narrative Review for a Machine Learning Application in Sports: An Example Based on Injury Forecasting in Soccer
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Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, 56127 Pisa, Italy
2
Institute of Information Science and Technologies, National Research Council, 56124 Pisa, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: David J Bentley and Goran Markovic
Sports 2022, 10(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/sports10010005
Received: 3 November 2021
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Revised: 9 December 2021
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Accepted: 22 December 2021
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Published: 24 December 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Artificial Intelligence in Sports Injury and Injury Prevention)
In the last decade, the number of studies about machine learning algorithms applied to sports, e.g., injury forecasting and athlete performance prediction, have rapidly increased. Due to the number of works and experiments already present in the state-of-the-art regarding machine-learning techniques in sport science, the aim of this narrative review is to provide a guideline describing a correct approach for training, validating, and testing machine learning models to predict events in sports science. The main contribution of this narrative review is to highlight any possible strengths and limitations during all the stages of model development, i.e., training, validation, testing, and interpretation, in order to limit possible errors that could induce misleading results. In particular, this paper shows an example about injury forecaster that provides a description of all the features that could be used to predict injuries, all the possible pre-processing approaches for time series analysis, how to correctly split the dataset to train and test the predictive models, and the importance to explain the decision-making approach of the white and black box models.
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Keywords:
soccer; artificial intelligence; sport science; training and testing
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MDPI and ACS Style
Rossi, A.; Pappalardo, L.; Cintia, P. A Narrative Review for a Machine Learning Application in Sports: An Example Based on Injury Forecasting in Soccer. Sports 2022, 10, 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports10010005
AMA Style
Rossi A, Pappalardo L, Cintia P. A Narrative Review for a Machine Learning Application in Sports: An Example Based on Injury Forecasting in Soccer. Sports. 2022; 10(1):5. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports10010005
Chicago/Turabian StyleRossi, Alessio, Luca Pappalardo, and Paolo Cintia. 2022. "A Narrative Review for a Machine Learning Application in Sports: An Example Based on Injury Forecasting in Soccer" Sports 10, no. 1: 5. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports10010005
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