Interpretable machine learning analysis of nonlinear error amplification under time pressure and positional ambiguity in elite blitz chess
摘要
Time pressure and positional ambiguity are two fundamental cognitive constraints that threaten human performance in sequential decision systems such as chess. However, the interactive and nonlinear nature of these factors has not yet been sufficiently quantified. In this study, 39,922 ply-level positions from blitz games of seven elite chess players on the Lichess platform were analysed using Stockfish 14.1 engine evaluation to examine how blunder probability varies across time pressure and positional ambiguity regimes. Cluster-robust logistic regression and histogram-based gradient boosting (HGB) models were applied comparatively and game phase included as a control variable. Permutation importance and SHAP values were used for explainability analyses. The findings reveal that blunder probability amplifies nonlinearly under the joint effect of low remaining time and high engine evaluation gap which is a pattern formally confirmed by restricted cubic spline regression (