Similarity Analysis of Action Trajectories Based on Kick Distributions

Abstract

This paper discusses the validity of similarity measures for action trajectories based on kick distributions. We focus on action trajectories for analyzing team strategies. Kick distribution is then obtained from the action trajectories, which allows us to quantitatively calculate the dissimilarity (or distance) between two team strategies. In this paper, three distance metrics are investigated as the similarity measure: Earth mover’s distance, $$L^2$$ distance, and Jensen-Shannon divergence. A series of numerical experiments are conducted to compare the evaluation of the similarity obtained by the distances with human subjective evaluations. The effectiveness of the distance metrics is also discussed in terms of the computational cost for calculating the distance.