Football Trajectory Modeling Using Masked Autoencoders : Using Masked Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection and Correction for Football Trajectories

Abstract: Football trajectory modeling is a powerful tool for predicting and evaluating the movement of a football and its dynamics. Masked autoencoders are scalable self-supervised learners used for representation learning of partially observable data. Masked autoencoders have been shown to provide successful results in pre-training for computer vision and natural language processing tasks. Using masked autoencoders in the multivariate time-series data field has not been researched to the same extent. This thesis aims to investigate the potential of using masked autoencoders for multivariate time-series modeling for football trajectory data in collaboration with Tracab. Two versions of the masked autoencoder network with alterations are tested, which are implemented to be used with multivariate time-series data. The resulting models are used to detect anomalies in the football trajectory and propose corrections based on the reconstruction. The results are evaluated, discussed, and compared against the tracked and manually corrected value of the ball trajectory. The performance of the different frameworks is compared and the overall anomaly detection capabilities are discussed. The result suggested that even though the regular autoencoder version had a smaller average reconstruction error during training and testing, using masked autoencoders improved the anomaly detection performance. The result suggested that neither the regular autoencoder nor the masked autoencoder managed to propose plausible trajectories to correct anomalies in the data. This thesis promotes further research to be done in the field of using masked autoencoders for time series and trajectory modeling.