Exploiting weighted association rule mining for indicating synergic formation tactics in soccer teams

Abstract

Managers make decisions on team tactics, formations, and player selection based on their own experiences. The managers have limitations in understanding the team's situation and sometimes they can think wrong. The purpose of this study is to make decisions on player selection and tactical formation according to the level of the opponent based on the data, not on the intuition of the manager. In our previous study, the Boruta algorithm was used to extract important features from 69 features in soccer player data by position. The detailed roles of each position were defined by using K-means algorithm. For example, the detailed roles of each position were defined as Mezzala, Shadow Striker, Deep-lying playmaker, and so on. That is, forward positions are classified as Target Man (TM) and Shadow Striker (SS). TM is a high-goal, high-competitive forward, and SS is a high-dribble, high-pass forward. In this study, we analyze a clustering dataset and the game appearance dataset. The game appearance dataset are divided into CL (Champions league Level), EL (Europa league Level), ML (Middle Level), and RL (Relegation Level). Association rule mining algorithm analyzes the synergy between positions, and selects a position with high synergy. Weighted association rule mining algorithm establishes player selection and tactical formation with the weight, which is the player's rating data. Finally, using the obtained results, we visualize the synergy between positions, tactical formation, and player characteristics depending on the level of the opponent.