A Novel Adaptive Sparrow Search Algorithm Based on Chaotic Mapping and T-Distribution Mutation

Aiming at the problems of the basic sparrow search algorithm (SSA) in terms of slow convergence speed and the ease of falling into the local optimum, the chaotic mapping strategy, adaptive weighting strategy and t-distribution mutation strategy are introduced to develop a novel adaptive sparrow search algorithm, namely the CWTSSA in this paper. In the proposed CWTSSA, the chaotic mapping strategy is employed to initialize the population in order to enhance the population diversity. The adaptive weighting strategy is applied to balance the capabilities of local mining and global exploration, and improve the convergence speed. An adaptive t-distribution mutation operator is designed, which uses the iteration number t as the degree of freedom parameter of the t-distribution to improve the characteristic of global exploration and local exploration abilities, so as to avoid falling into the local optimum. In order to prove the effectiveness of the CWTSSA, 15 standard test functions and other improved SSAs, differential evolution (DE), particle swarm optimization (PSO), gray wolf optimization (GWO) are selected here. The compared experiment results indicate that the proposed CWTSSA can obtain higher convergence accuracy, faster convergence speed, better diversity and exploration abilities. It provides a new optimization algorithm for solving complex optimization problems.

Improving Sports Outcome Prediction Process Using Integrating Adaptive Weighted Features and Machine Learning Techniques

Developing an effective sports performance analysis process is an attractive issue in sports team management. This study proposed an improved sports outcome prediction process by integrating adaptive weighted features and machine learning algorithms for basketball game score prediction. The feature engineering method is used to construct designed features based on game-lag information and adaptive weighting of variables in the proposed prediction process. These designed features are then applied to the five machine learning methods, including classification and regression trees (CART), random forest (RF), stochastic gradient boosting (SGB), eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and extreme learning machine (ELM) for constructing effective prediction models. The empirical results from National Basketball Association (NBA) data revealed that the proposed sports outcome prediction process could generate a promising prediction result compared to the competing models without adaptive weighting features. Our results also showed that the machine learning models with four game-lags information and adaptive weighting of power could generate better prediction performance.