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Sports Statistics Research

AFL Heatmaps - by current PhD student Karl Jackson

In order to investigate spatial tactics of players and/or teams, it is first necessary to be able to create a graphical representation of their possessions. One of the simplest questions to answer using spatial data is ?Where is he getting the ball??. Simple plotting of data points is possible, but with players gaining upwards of 30 possessions a game, this can quickly become unreadable. To remedy this, locations of possessions are represented by empirical density functions and have the commercial branding of heatmaps. See the following document for some examples.

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Study statistics at Swinburne

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