There are models that do learn several latent features for each player [e.g. 1]. And I recently supervised a Master's project motivated by exactly your observat

There are models that do learn several latent features for each player [e.g. 1]. And I recently supervised a Master's project motivated by exactly your observation[2]. Models with multiple features per player do make better predictions, but by less than I'd hoped. A result from the Master's project, which surprised me, was quite how much details of the approximate inference mattered — much more so than the choice of model. [1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rpa/adams-dahl-murray-2010a.shtml http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rpa/adams-dahl-murray-2010a.shtml [2] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/projects/2011_marius_stanescu_msc.pdf http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/projects/2011_marius_...