Glocal Explanations of Expected Goal Models in Soccer
This provides a domain-specific tool for soccer analysts to better understand model predictions for groups of observations, though it is incremental as it adapts existing explainable AI methods.
The paper tackled the limited interpretability of expected goal models in soccer by introducing glocal explanations using aggregated SHAP values and partial dependence profiles, enabling performance analysis at team and player levels rather than just single shots.
The expected goal models have gained popularity, but their interpretability is often limited, especially when trained using black-box methods. Explainable artificial intelligence tools have emerged to enhance model transparency and extract descriptive knowledge for a single observation or for all observations. However, explaining black-box models for a specific group of observations may be more useful in some domains. This paper introduces the glocal explanations (between local and global levels) of the expected goal models to enable performance analysis at the team and player levels by proposing the use of aggregated versions of the SHAP values and partial dependence profiles. This allows knowledge to be extracted from the expected goal model for a player or team rather than just a single shot. In addition, we conducted real-data applications to illustrate the usefulness of aggregated SHAP and aggregated profiles. The paper concludes with remarks on the potential of these explanations for performance analysis in soccer analytics.