SoccerCPD: Formation and Role Change-Point Detection in Soccer Matches Using Spatiotemporal Tracking Data

TL;DR

SoccerCPD is a novel change-point detection framework that accurately identifies tactical formation and role changes in soccer matches using spatiotemporal tracking data, addressing limitations of previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces a two-step change-point detection method for formations and roles, improving the analysis of tactical shifts in soccer matches.

Findings

Accurately detects formation change-points in soccer matches.

Effectively identifies role change-points based on role permutations.

Provides interpretable results for domain participants.

Abstract

In fluid team sports such as soccer and basketball, analyzing team formation is one of the most intuitive ways to understand tactics from domain participants' point of view. However, existing approaches either assume that team formation is consistent throughout a match or assign formations frame-by-frame, which disagree with real situations. To tackle this issue, we propose a change-point detection framework named SoccerCPD that distinguishes tactically intended formation and role changes from temporary changes in soccer matches. We first assign roles to players frame-by-frame and perform two-step change-point detections: (1) formation change-point detection based on the sequence of role-adjacency matrices and (2) role change-point detection based on the sequence of role permutations. The evaluation of SoccerCPD using the ground truth annotated by domain experts shows that our method accurately detects the points of tactical changes and estimates the formation and role assignment per segment. Lastly, we introduce practical use-cases that domain participants can easily interpret and utilize.