用轴向注意力网络预测足球比赛每名球员、球队和整场比赛的13种动作次数。

Football (soccer) is a sport that is characterised by complex game play, where players perform a variety of actions, such as passes, shots, tackles, fouls, in order to score goals, and ultimately win matches. Accurately forecasting the total number of each action that each player will complete during a match is desirable for a variety of applications, including tactical decision-making, sports betting, and for television broadcast commentary and analysis. Such predictions must consider the game state, the ability and skill of the players in both teams, the interactions between the players, and the temporal dynamics of the game as it develops. In this paper, we present a transformer-based neural network that jointly and recurrently predicts the expected totals for thirteen individual actions at multiple time-steps during the match, and where predictions are made for each individual player, each team and at the game-level. The neural network is based on an \emph{axial transformer} that efficiently captures the temporal dynamics as the game progresses, and the interactions between the players at each time-step. We present a novel axial transformer design that we show is equivalent to a regular sequential transformer, and the design performs well experimentally. We show empirically that the model can make consistent and reliable predictions, and efficiently makes $\sim$75,000 live predictions at low latency for each game.