Sleep quality prediction in basketball athletes using a deep learning framework with an attention mechanism based on multimodal data

It is difficult for traditional prediction methods to comprehensively evaluate the sleep quality problems of college basketball players, which is a key research problem in the field of physical education in colleges and universities. This study aims to develop an applied multimodal tabular-learning framework with feature-level attention for sleep-quality screening among university basketball athletes. Empirical data were collected from student-athletes at a university, including physical fitness indicators (e.g., BMI, strength, endurance), psychological characteristics (anxiety and stress), and sociodemographic variables (gender, grade, and years of training). Sleep quality was assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). After data preprocessing, including cleaning, standardization, and one-hot encoding, four predictive models-Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, and Attention-based Multilayer Perceptron (Attention-MLP)-were constructed and compared. The Attention-MLP model outperformed other models in accuracy (0.732) and F1 value (0.630), showing the advantage of modeling complex feature interaction, while BMI and anxiety were identified as the most influential predictors. However, discrimination for the moderate sleep-quality class was poor (Class 2 AUC = 0.40), indicating that the current model is more suitable for screening-oriented stratification rather than definitive classification. The results show that the Attention-MLP achieved statistically significant but moderate gains over classic baselines under the current sample size, supporting screening-oriented risk stratification rather than definitive diagnosis.