Talk Title: Latent Style Allocation for Describing Serve Return Patterns in Professional Tennis

Abstract: Recently publicized tracking data for men's professional tennis has created the opportunity for the first detailed spatial analysis of the return impact characteristics of elite tennis players. Mixture models are an appealing model-based framework for spatial analysis in sport where latent variable discovery is often of primary interest. Although finite mixture models have the advantages of being highly interpretable and scalable, most implementations have the conditional spatial distribution within each latent subgroup as a standard parametric distribution. In this talk, I'll present a more flexible alternative that allows the conditional distribution in each latent category to be a mixed member of finite Gaussian mixtures. This model was motivated by efforts to describe common styles of return impact location of professional tennis players. In a fully Bayesian implementation in the Stan language, we apply the model to 142,803 return points played by 141 pro men's players between 2018 and 2020 and identify six unique impact styles on the first and second serve return.

Biography: Stephanie Kovalchik is a Senior Data Scientist at Zelus Analytics. Before joining Zelus, Stephanie led data science innovation for the Game Insight Group of Tennis Australia, building first-of-a-kind metrics and real-time applications with tracking data. Stephanie has over 40+ published scientific papers in the area of causal inference and tennis analytics. She is also the creator of the tennis blog On The T (on-the-t.com).

Talk Title: Pitch Control

Bio: William Spearman joined Liverpool FC in 2018 as Lead Data Scientist where he utilises spatiotemporal tracking data to support the men’s first team. Before joining Liverpool, he pioneered the concept of pitch control, and he has used physics-based modelling to construct visualisable models of open space, pass difficulty, and off-ball scoring opportunity.

William has a background in high energy particle physics. He completed his PhD, a measurement of the mass and width of the Higgs Boson, at Harvard University through a collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).