Transforming Football Data into Object-centric Event Logs with Spatial Context Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework to convert football match data into object-centric event logs with spatial context, enabling advanced process analysis in sports analytics.

Contribution

It presents the first method for creating object-centric event logs from football data, incorporating spatial information to enhance process mining applications.

Findings

Generated realistic object-centric event logs from real football data

Demonstrated the framework's effectiveness across different process representations

Highlighted potential for improved sports analytics and process understanding

Abstract

Object-centric event logs expand the conventional single-case notion event log by considering multiple objects, allowing for the analysis of more complex and realistic process behavior. However, the number of real-world object-centric event logs remains limited, and further studies are needed to test their usefulness. The increasing availability of data from team sports can facilitate object-centric process mining, leveraging both real-world data and suitable use cases. In this paper, we present a framework for transforming football (soccer) data into an object-centric event log, further enhanced with a spatial dimension. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by generating object-centric event logs based on real-world football data and discuss the results for varying process representations. With our paper, we provide the first example for object-centric event logs in football analytics. Future work should consider variant analysis and filtering techniques to better handle variability