Applying Machine Learning Methods to Predict the Outcome of Shots in Football

Sammanfattning: The thesis investigates a publicly available dataset which covers morethan three million events in football matches. The aim of the study isto train machine learning models capable of modeling the relationshipbetween a shot event and its outcome. That is, to predict if a footballshot will result in a goal or not. By representing the shot indifferent ways, the aim is to draw conclusion regarding what elementsof a shot allows for a good prediction of its outcome. The shotrepresentation was varied both by including different numbers of eventspreceding the shot and by varying the set of features describing eachevent.The study shows that the performance of the machine learning modelsbenefit from including events preceding the shot. The highestpredictive performance was achieved by a long short-term memory neuralnetwork trained on the shot event and six events preceding the shot.The features which were found to have the largest positive impact onthe shot events were the precision of the event, the position on thefield and how the player was in contact with the ball. The size of thedataset was also evaluated and the results suggest that it issufficiently large for the size of the networks evaluated.