Identifying electronic gaming machine gambling personae through unsupervised session classification

Abstract

The rising accessibility in gambling products, such as Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM), has increased interest in the effects of gambling; in particular, the potential for impulse control disorders, such as problem gambling. Nevertheless, empirical research of EGM gambling behaviour is scarce. In this exploratory study, we apply data mining techniques on 46,416 gambling sessions, collected in situ from 288 EGMs. Our research focused on identifying the at-risk behavioural markers of sessions to help distinguish gambling personae. Our data included measures of gambling involvement, out-of pocket expense of sessions, amount won, and cost of gambling. This research, discusses the methodology used to collect and analyze the required gambling measures, explains the criteria used for identifying valid sessions, and combines outlier mining methods to identify instances of heavily involved gambling (i.e., outliers). Our results suggest that sessions were classified as potential non-problem, potential low-risk, potential moderate risk, and potential problem gambling sessions. Further, outlier sessions were more heavily involved in terms of gambling intensity and amount redeemed, despite having low duration times. Finally, our methods suggest that the lack of player identification does not prevent one from identifying the potential incidence of problem gambling behaviour.