mixture model

What a Model of Player Availability Can Tell Us About Probable Injuries in Tennis

What a Model of Player Availability Can Tell Us About Probable Injuries in Tennis

The 2020 tennis calendar was put into a tailspin by the pandemic. In a normal year, a player’s competitive schedule can tell us a lot about a player’s overall readiness to play, what I will call a player’s ‘availability’. In this post, I show how a Hidden Markov Model can be used to describe a player’s competitive schedule as the output from periods of varying availability and how irregularities in availability can be a tell-tale sign of probable injury.