Athlete monitoring data may be recorded minute by minute throughout a match or training session, while injury information may only indicate whether the entire session was injury-associated. This creates a modelling problem: assigning the same session-level label to every minute would imply that injury status is known at each exact time, even though within-session injury onset is unknown. Our novelty is a fixed-landmark, one-representation-per-athlete-session formulation that directly addresses this mismatch. Instead of labelling every minute, we construct one representation per athlete-session at each landmark using information observed up to that point. This keeps the target at the session level and avoids unsupported minute-level injury supervision. A landmark is a fixed time point within the same session, such as 10, 20, or 30 minutes. At each landmark, we assess whether the whole session is injury-associated or non-injury-associated and examine how discrimination changes as more within-session information becomes available. Using 2020 SoccerMon data, we analyse 3,743 athlete-sessions from 48 elite women's football athletes, including 22 injury-associated sessions from five athletes. We evaluate pre-session, cumulative, dynamic, and combined representations with athlete-disjoint validation, athlete-cluster bootstrap uncertainty, common-cohort sensitivity analysis, alternative negative-athlete fold allocations, equal-athlete weighting, and Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost benchmarks. Primary CUM+DYN Logistic Regression yields ROC-AUC 0.367-0.607 and PR-AUC 0.0080-0.0150 across landmarks, with wide uncertainty. PRE-containing representations show higher point estimates at several landmarks but remain uncertain.
Francisco Erramuspe Alvarez, Shobharani Polasa, Weihao Qu +2cs.LG
Machine learning has had a significant positive impact on the prediction of athlete performance and injury risk. Most works in this field rely on subjective observations and expert assessments, which restrict their effectiveness. In sports like soccer, basketball, and wrestling, some studies attempt to address this challenge by integrating data from alternative sources, such as readings from wearable devices, alongside traditional subjective observations and expert assessments to enhance accuracy. However, similar research in tennis remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a multimodal Predictive Athlete Readiness framework for Tennis (PART) to assess both performance and injury risk in tennis players. By leveraging machine learning and deep learning techniques, PART processes multiple sources of data collected from nine collegiate tennis players, including physiological metrics, training and match data, sleep data from wearable devices, self-reported information via daily questionnaires, jump assessments, and motion analysis from match play videos. PART captures four characteristics of tennis players: overall wellness, injury risk, physical capability, and playing style. By integrating these four characteristics by supervised learning, it is capable of providing a holistic assessment of the tennis athlete's condition, along with advanced forecasts of specific body areas at risk such as the upper body (e.g., elbows) or lower body (e.g., knees). Our evaluation, conducted with data from nine collegiate tennis players, shows that PART achieves strong performance in predicting both overall wellness and injury risk. Additionally, our framework also shows promise for recreational tennis players, who often suffer from injuries due to incorrect playing techniques.
Machine learning has had a positive impact on the sports industry, with one of its most promising applications being the prediction of athlete performance and injury risk. Recent advances have employed state-of-the-art models to improve prediction accuracy, yet progress remains limited by data availability and the reliance on subjective observations or expert assessments. To address these limitations, researchers in sports such as soccer, basketball, and wrestling have begun integrating heterogeneous data sources, such as wearable device readings, with traditional subjective assessments. However, similar multimodal approaches remain underexplored in tennis. In this work, we propose a multimodal weighted ensemble learning framework, Predictive Athlete Readiness for Tennis (PART), to monitor athlete wellness and estimate near-term injury risk in tennis players. PART processes a wide range of inputs, including physiological metrics, training and match data, sleep information from wearable devices, self-reported questionnaires, vertical jump assessments, and motion analysis from match-play videos. From these modalities, specialized machine learning and deep learning models independently extract four athlete-specific characteristics: overall wellness, injury risk, physical capability, and playing style. To overcome the complexity of combining these diverse modalities, PART employs a supervised weighted ensemble integration strategy, assigning adaptive weights to each predictive model based on its reliability. Evaluation of multimodal data collected from nine collegiate tennis players demonstrates that PART achieves strong performance in monitoring athlete wellness and estimating near-term injury susceptibility. Beyond collegiate athletes, the framework also shows promise for recreational tennis players, offering personalized insights to mitigate injury risk and optimize performance.