Interactive sequential generative models for team sports

Abstract Understanding spatiotemporal coordination of players in team sports is key to movement models, pattern detection, and computational tactics. Existing generative models propose to capture all stochasticity by a single latent variable and may suffer from entangled representations, or aim to uncover interaction structures of players but then do not focus on their generative ability. As a remedy, we propose a hierarchical latent variable model for predicting trajectories of multiple players. In the generative model, both, discrete role assignments and a latent interaction graph are sampled to allow for different models in subsequent node updates and message passing operations between nodes, where standard Gaussian latent variables are employed per agent and timestep. We cast our approach as a variational autoencoder that provides a disentangled latent space to capture variability in team sport movements and propose a neural architecture for its optimization. We empirically evaluate our approach on tracking data from basketball and soccer and observe that our contribution outperforms the state-of-art in all experiments.