Performance of machine learning models in application to beach volleyball data.

Driven by the increased availability of position and performance data, automated analyses are becoming the daily routine in many top-level sports. Methods from the domains of data mining and machine learning are more frequently used to generate new insights from massive amounts of data. This study evaluates the performance of four current models (multi-layer perceptron, convolutional network, recurrent network, gradient boosted tree) in classifying tactical behaviors on a beach volleyball dataset consisting of 1,356 top-level games. A three-way between-subjects analysis of variance was conducted to determine the effects of model, input features and target behavior on classification accuracy. Results show significant differences in classification accuracy between models as well as significant interaction effects between factors. Our models achieve classification performance similar to previous work in other sports. Nonetheless, they are not yet at the level to warrant practical application in day to day performance analysis in beach volleyball.