<![CDATA[Badminton rallies consist of complex and rapid stroke transitions that reflect players’ tactical decision-making. While prior studies have examined stroke patterns descriptively or applied standalone predictive models, limited research integrates interpretable sequential pattern mining with deep learning for next-stroke prediction. This study proposes an integrated SPADE–LSTM framework to analyze and predict badminton stroke sequences using a 10-class scheme (drive, dropshot, lob, netting, and smash for two athletes). Match data were transformed into structured stroke sequences and contextual features, then divided into training, validation, and test sets using a match–set–rally grouping strategy to prevent information leakage. Sequential patterns were first extracted using the Sequential Pattern Discovery using Equivalent Classes (SPADE) algorithm to capture frequent tactical transitions. These pattern-based features were subsequently used to train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for multi-class classification. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 88.68%, with weighted precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.9075, 0.8868, and 0.8851, respectively. Misclassifications were mainly observed in tactically similar stroke transitions and minority classes. The results indicate that integrating interpretable sequential pattern mining with deep learning provides both strong predictive performance and meaningful tactical insights for badminton performance analysis.]]>
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