Machine learning approach to model sport training

The aim of this study was to use a machine learning approach combining fuzzy modeling with an immune algorithm to model sport training, in particular swimming. A proposed algorithm mines the available data and delivers the results in a form of a set of fuzzy rules “IF (fuzzy conditions) THEN (class)”. Fuzzy logic is a powerful method to cope with continuous data, to overcome problem of overlapping class definitions, and to improve the rule comprehensibility. Sport training is modeled at the level of microcycle and training unit by 12 independent attributes. The data was collected in two months (February–March 2008), among swimmers from swimming sections in Wrocław, Poland. The swimmers had minimum of 7 years of training and reached the II class level in swimming classification from 2005 to 2008. The goal of the performed experiments was to find the rules answering the question – how does the training unit influence swimmer’s feelings while being in water the next day? The fuzzy rules were inferred for two different scales of the class to be predicted. The effectiveness of the learned set of rules reached 68.66%. The performance, in terms of classification accuracy, of the proposed approach was compared with traditional classifier schemes. The accuracy of the result of compared methods is significantly lower than the accuracy of fuzzy rules obtained by a method presented in this study (paired t-test, P < 0.05).