Identifying player skill of dota 2 using machine learning pipeline

Abstract

The esports industry is one of the prominent business sectors in the digital era, particularly, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games which gain much attention from gamers and streaming audiences. Among such games, Defense of the Ancient 2 or Dota 2 is the record holder for the highest prize esports tournament. Therefore, various companies and investors start their esports teams to compete in the Dota 2 tournaments, the Internationals. To success in the competition, player recruitment is a crucial process as it usually takes considerable effort to find a skillful player. Watching the game replay to evaluate the player’s skill is one of the approaches. However, it can be too exhaustive, also some player’s ranking, which represent the player’s skill, are often not available. In this paper, we propose an effective machine learning pipeline to evaluate the player’s skill. Our designed pipeline includes data collection, feature engineering, and machine learning modeling. We show the data collection process using open-source API. An effective method for feature engineering is proposed. Features, e.g., end-game, or tactical decision related statistics, are incorporated along with the resource in the game distribution, harassment tactic, or spatiotemporal features, in order to provide effective models. Subsequently, we apply major machine learning models based on a single game data, i.e., logistic regression and random forest, to the processed data. The most effective model can achieve up to 0.7091 precision, 0.5850 recall, 0.6411 F1-score, and 0.8123 ROC AUC score.