Because the decathlon tests many facets of athleticism, including sprinting, throwing, jumping, and endurance, many consider it to be the ultimate test of athletic ability. On this view, estimating the maximal decathlon score and understanding what it would take to achieve that score provides insight into the upper limits of human athletic potential. To this end, we develop a Bayesian composition model for forecasting how individual athletes perform in each of the 10 decathlon events of time. Besides capturing potential non-linear temporal trends in performance, our model carefully captures the dependence between performance in an event and all preceding events. Using our model, we can simulate and evaluate the distribution of the maximal possible scores and identify profiles of athletes who could realistically attain scores approaching this limit.

翻译：由于十项全能测试了包括短跑、投掷、跳跃和耐力在内的多方面运动能力，许多人认为它是对运动能力的终极考验。基于这一观点，估算十项全能的最大可能得分并理解实现该得分所需的条件，有助于洞悉人类运动潜力的上限。为此，我们开发了一个贝叶斯组合模型，用于预测个体运动员在十项全能中10个时间性项目中的表现。除了捕捉成绩中潜在的非线性时间趋势外，我们的模型还仔细刻画了运动员在某一项目中的表现与其之前所有项目表现之间的依赖关系。利用该模型，我们可以模拟并评估最大可能得分的分布，并识别出那些在现实中可能接近这一极限得分的运动员特征。