An unsupervised machine learning approach to evaluate sports facilities condition in primary school

PLoS One. 2022 Apr 20;17(4):e0267009. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267009. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Sports facilities have been acknowledged as one of the crucial environmental factors for children's physical education, physical fitness, and participation in physical activity. Finding a solution for the effective and objective evaluation of the condition of sports facilities in schools (SSFs) with the responding quantitative magnitude is an uncertain task. This paper describes the utilization of an unsupervised machine learning method to objectively evaluate the condition of sports facilities in primary school (PSSFC). The statistical data of 845 samples with nine PSSFC indicators (indoor and outdoor included) were collected from the Sixth National Sports Facility Census in mainland China (NSFC), an official nationwide quinquennial census. The Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm was applied to cluster the samples in accordance with the similarity of PSSFC. The clustered data were visualized by using t-stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). The statistics results showed that the application of t-SNE and FCM led to the acceptable performance of clustering SSFs data into three types with differences in PSSFC. The effects of school category, location factors, and the interaction on PSSFC were analyzed by two-way analysis of covariance, which indicated that regional PSSFC has geographical and typological characteristics: schools in the suburbs are superior to those in the inner city, schools with more grades of students are configured with better variety and larger size of sports facilities. In conclusion, we have developed a combinatorial machine learning clustering approach that is suitable for objective evaluation on PSSFC and indicates its characteristics.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Child
  • Exercise
  • Humans
  • Physical Education and Training
  • Physical Fitness
  • Schools*
  • Unsupervised Machine Learning*

Grants and funding

Research Project from the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 19080503000). J Z. http://svc.stcsm.sh.gov.cn/ Research Project from the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (No. 20080502700). JH W, J X. http://svc.stcsm.sh.gov.cn/ National Key Research and Development Project of China from the Ministry of Science and Technology (No. 2018YFF0300505). J X, JH W. http://service.most.gov.cn Grand-in-Aid for Postdoctoral Scientific Research from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2018M632148). J Z, PJ C, J X. http://jj.chinapostdoctor.org.cn/ All funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.