A deep learning approach to injury forecasting in NBA basketball

Abstract

Predicting athlete injury risk has been a holy grail in sports medicine with little progress to date due to a variety of factors such as small sample sizes, significantly imbalanced data, and inadequate statistical approaches. Data modeling which does not account for multiple interactions across factors can be misleading. We address the small sample size by collecting longitudinal data of NBA player injuries using publicly available data sources and develop a state of the art deep learning model, METIC, to predict future injuries based on past injuries, game activity, and player statistics. We evaluate model performance using metrics appropriate for imbalanced data and find that METIC performs significantly better than other traditional machine learning approaches. METIC uses feature learning to create interactive features which become meaningful in combination with each other. METIC can be used by practitioners and front offices to improve athlete management and reduce injury incidence, potentially saving sports teams millions in revenue due to reduced athlete injuries.