Talent identification in soccer using a one-class support vector machine

Abstract Identifying potential future elite athletes is important in many sporting events. The successful identification of potential future elite athletes at an early age would help to provide high-quality coaching and training environments in which to optimize their development. However, a large variety of different skills and qualities are needed to succeed in elite sports, making talent identification generally a complex and multifaceted problem. Due to the rarity of elite athletes, datasets are inherently imbalanced, making classical statistical inference difficult. Therefore, we approach talent identification as an anomaly detection problem. We trained a nonlinear one-class support ve…