Bike2Vec: Vector Embedding Representations of Road Cycling Riders and Races
This work addresses the need for data-driven insights in sports analytics, specifically for road cycling, but it is incremental as it adapts existing embedding methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of representing professional road cycling riders and races numerically by applying vector embeddings to historical results, demonstrating that the embeddings capture relevant features and could be used for tasks like talent identification and outcome prediction.
Vector embeddings have been successfully applied in several domains to obtain effective representations of non-numeric data which can then be used in various downstream tasks. We present a novel application of vector embeddings in professional road cycling by demonstrating a method to learn representations for riders and races based on historical results. We use unsupervised learning techniques to validate that the resultant embeddings capture interesting features of riders and races. These embeddings could be used for downstream prediction tasks such as early talent identification and race outcome prediction.