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. 2024 Mar 4;19(3):e0297270.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297270. eCollection 2024.

Pro-cycling team cyclist assignment for an upcoming race

Affiliations

Pro-cycling team cyclist assignment for an upcoming race

Maor Sagi et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Professional bicycle racing is a popular sport that has attracted significant attention in recent years. The evolution and ubiquitous use of sensors allow cyclists to measure many metrics including power, heart rate, speed, cadence, and more in training and racing. In this paper we explore for the first time assignment of a subset of a team's cyclists to an upcoming race. We introduce RaceFit, a model that recommends, based on recent workouts and past assignments, cyclists for participation in an upcoming race. RaceFit consists of binary classifiers that are trained on pairs of a cyclist and a race, described by their relevant properties (features) such as the cyclist's demographic properties, as well as features extracted from his workout data from recent weeks; as well additional properties of the race, such as its distance, elevation gain, and more. Two main approaches are introduced in recommending on each stage in a race and aggregate from it to the race, or on the entire race. The model training is based on binary label which represent participation of cyclist in a race (or in a stage) in past events. We evaluated RaceFit rigorously on a large dataset of three pro-cycling teams' cyclists and race data achieving up to 80% precision@i. The first experiment had shown that using TP or STRAVA data performs the same. Then the best-performing parameters of the framework are using 5 weeks time window, imputation was effective, and the CatBoost classifier performed best. However, the model with any of the parameters performed always better than the baselines, in which the cyclists are assigned based on their popularity in historical data. Additionally, we present the top-ranked predictive features.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. RaceFit, a block diagram of the binary classification-based recommendation framework.
The classifier is trained on examples that consist of pairs of a race and a cyclist.
Fig 2
Fig 2. The training phase of the RaceFit given race, cyclist, and the sumWorkout summarized vector of workouts from the last weeks.
Fig 3
Fig 3. The recommendation phase of RaceFit given an upcoming race and the team’s cyclists along with their last workouts.
Fig 4
Fig 4. The training phase of RaceFit given race, cyclist and the sumWorkout summarized vector of workouts from the last weeks.
Fig 5
Fig 5. The recommendation phase of RaceFit given an upcoming race and the team’s cyclists, along with their properties and recent workouts.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Generally using the TP and STRAVA data performs similar, and using imputation and the CatBoost performs best.
Fig 7
Fig 7. Using TP and STRAVA data with imputation and Catboost classifier, outperform other parameters.
Fig 8
Fig 8. Comparison of the different parameters on average for all teams, and best run parameters results on average.
Catboost and the Imputation use improve the model performance significantly.
Fig 9
Fig 9. Comparison of the teams results on average using Cyclist–Stage algorithm.
5-weeks window, using imputation and Catboost classifier provide better results than other parameters.

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References

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Grants and funding

This study was financially supported by the Sylvan Adams Family Israel in the form of a donation. No additional external funding was received for this study.
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