PIVOT: A Parsimonious End-to-End Learning Framework for Valuing Player Actions in Handball using Tracking Data

Over the last years, several approaches for the data-driven estimation of expected possession value (EPV) in basketball and association football (soccer) have been proposed. In this paper, we develop and evaluate PIVOT: the first such framework for team handball. Accounting for the fast-paced, dynamic nature and relative data scarcity of hand- ball, we propose a parsimonious end-to-end deep learning architecture that relies solely on tracking data. This efficient approach is capable of predicting the probability that a team will score within the near future given the fine-grained spatio-temporal distribution of all players and the ball over the last seconds of the game. Our experiments indicate that PIVOT is able to produce accurate and calibrated probability estimates, even when trained on a relatively small dataset. We also showcase two interactive applications of PIVOT for valuing actual and counterfactual player decisions and actions in real-time.