Machine learning models for DOTA 2 outcomes prediction

Abstract

Prediction of the real-time multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games' match outcome is one of the most important and exciting tasks in Esports analytical research. This research paper predominantly focuses on building predictive machine and deep learning models to identify the outcome of the Dota 2 MOBA game using the new method of multi-forward steps predictions. Three models were investigated and compared: Linear Regression (LR), Neural Networks (NN), and a type of recurrent neural network Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). In order to achieve the goals, we developed a data collecting python server using Game State Integration (GSI) to track the real-time data of the players. Once the exploratory feature analysis and tuning hyper-parameters were done, our models' experiments took place on different players with dissimilar backgrounds of playing experiences. The achieved accuracy scores depend on the multi-forward prediction parameters, which for the worse case in linear regression 69\% but on average 82\%, while in the deep learning models hit the utmost accuracy of prediction on average 88\% for NN, and 93\% for LSTM models.