Multi-Objective Multi-Instance Learning: A New Approach to Machine Learning for eSports

The aim of this study is to develop a new approach to be able to correctly predict the outcome of electronic sports (eSports) matches using machine learning methods. Previous research has emphasized player-centric prediction and has used standard (single-instance) classification techniques. However, a team-centric classification is required since team cooperation is essential in completing game missions and achieving final success. To bridge this gap, in this study, we propose a new approach, called Multi-Objective Multi-Instance Learning (MOMIL). It is the first study that applies the multi-instance learning technique to make win predictions in eSports. The proposed approach jointly considers the objectives of the players in a team to capture relationships between players during the classification. In this study, entropy was used as a measure to determine the impurity (uncertainty) of the training dataset when building decision trees for classification. The experiments that were carried out on a publicly available eSports dataset show that the proposed multi-objective multi-instance classification approach outperforms the standard classification approach in terms of accuracy. Unlike the previous studies, we built the models on season-based data. Our approach is up to 95% accurate for win prediction in eSports. Our method achieved higher performance than the state-of-the-art methods tested on the same dataset.