Mining Olympic Sailing Boat Telemetry Data

Current on-board technology means it is possible to obtain data with respect to around ten aspects of a sailing boat's state per sample point. These include position via GPS, rudder angle, wind angle, wind speed, 3-axis accelerometer, etc. It is possible to derive others thereafter. Video and weather information is also typically available. Thus far adjustments based on such data, if it is utilised at all, have relied upon the interpretation of the coach and/or athletes. It is proposed that the data may contain previously unknown information regarding the variables and boat speed and hence that data mining should be explored. The data mining task is thus one of numerical prediction and a number of well-known approaches will be explored. Thereafter approaches to knowledge discovery will be employed, particularly explicit feature selection and rule extraction in the case of artificial neural networks.