Sports Data Analytics: A Case Study of off-Field Behavior of Players

The field of sports science is highly emerging and has made the headlines in the research and development activities, with new challenges and trends in the recent past. Sports analytics is the analysis of historical big data mainly available in the form of statistics to provide a proper insight into the entire team, an individual, or even the coach. It also facilitates decision-making for both on-field and off-field performances of all the concerned. The term “sports analytics” was popularized in 2011. It has also created a platform under the confluence of many disciplines such as data mining, machine learning, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. The paper aims at analyzing the off-field behavior of players using a statistical approach. The focus of the study is to comprehend the nature of data set, explore the relation between the attributes of the data set, and create a model to understand how the data relates to the underlying population using a real world data set. It comprises motion sensor data of 19 activities among both male and female categories. The sports data set is referred from the UCI repository. It consists of motor sensor data collected for both male and female players. The data set also clearly displays the three dimensions of big data namely, volume, variety, and veracity.