Comparison of Parametric and Non-Parametric Population Modelling of Sport Performances

This work compares the performance of parametric mixed-effects models to a completely non-parametric (NP) approach for modelling life-long evolution of competition performance for athletes. The difficulty of the problem lies in the strongly unbalanced characteristics of the functional dataset. The prediction performance of the identified models is compared, revealing the advantages and limitations of the two approaches. As far as we know this is the first time NP modelling of athletic performance is attempted, our study confirming its appropriateness whenever sufficiently rich datasets are available.