"pattern recognition" entries

Pattern recognition and sports data

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Award-winning journalist David Epstein on the (data) science of sports.

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Julien_Vervaecke_and_Maurice_Geldhof

Julien Vervaecke and Maurice Geldhof smoking a cigarette at the 1927 Tour de France. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

One of my favorite books from the last few years is David Epstein’s engaging tour through sports science using examples and stories from a wide variety of athletic endeavors. Epstein draws on examples from individual sports (including track and field, winter sports) and major U.S. team sports (baseball, basketball, and American football), and uses the latest research to explain how data and science are being used to improve athletic performance.

In a recent episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, I spoke with Epstein about his book, data science and sports, and his recent series of articles detailing suspicious practices at one of the world’s premier track and field training programs (the Oregon Project).

Nature/nurture and hardware/software

Epstein’s book contains examples of sports where athletes with certain physical attributes start off with an advantage. In relation to that, we discussed feature selection and feature engineering — the relative importance of factors like training methods, technique, genes, equipment, and diet — topics which Epstein has written about and studied extensively:

One of the most important findings in sports genetics is that your ability to improve with respect to a certain training program is mediated by your genes, so it’s really important to find the kind of training program that’s best tailored to your physiology. … The skills it takes for team sports, these perceptual skills, nobody is born with those. Those are completely software, to use the computer analogy. But it turns out that once the software is downloaded, it’s like a computer. While your hardware doesn’t do anything alone without software, once you’ve got the software, the hardware actually makes a lot of a difference in how good of an operating machine you have. It can be obscured when people don’t study it correctly, which is why I took on some of the 10,000 hours stuff. Read more…

The data lake model is a powerhouse for invention

In this O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Edd Dumbill on the data lake, and Rajiv Maheswaran on the science of moving dots.

In a recent blog post, Edd Dumbill, VP of strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, wrote about the phrase “data lake.” Likening it to a dream, he described a data lake as “a place with data-centered architecture, where silos are minimized, and processing happens with little friction in a scalable, distributed environment…Data itself is no longer restrained by initial schema decisions, and can be exploited more freely by the enterprise.” He explained that he called it a “dream” because “we’ve a way to go to make the vision come true” — but noted he’s optimistic the dream can be realized.

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In this Radar Podcast epidsode, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum sits down with Dumbill to talk about the data lake, the opportunities the model presents, and the driving forces behind the concept. Read more…

The science of moving dots: the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast

Rajiv Maheswaran talks about the tools and techniques required to analyze new kinds of sports data.

Many data scientists are comfortable working with structured operational data and unstructured text. Newer techniques like deep learning have opened up data types like images, video, and audio.

Other common data sources are garnering attention. With the rise of mobile phones equipped with GPS, I’m meeting many more data scientists at start-ups and large companies who specialize in spatio-temporal pattern recognition. Analyzing “moving dots” requires specialized tools and techniques.

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A few months ago, I sat down with Rajiv Maheswaran founder and CEO of Second Spectrum, a company that applies analytics to sports tracking data. Maheswaran talked about this new kind of data and the challenge of finding patterns:

“It’s interesting because it’s a new type of data problem. Everybody knows that big data machine learning has done a lot of stuff in structured data, in photos, in translation for language, but moving dots is a very new kind of data where you haven’t figured out the right feature set to be able to find patterns from. There’s no language of moving dots, at least not that computers understand. People understand it very well, but there’s no computational language of moving dots that are interacting. We wanted to build that up, mostly because data about moving dots is very, very new. It’s only in the last five years, between phones and GPS and new tracking technologies, that moving data has actually emerged.”

Read more…