Automatic Classification of Games using Support Vector Machine

TL;DR

This paper develops a support vector machine classifier to predict game categories based on game descriptions and titles, achieving around 70-77% accuracy, aiding market analysis for game developers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of SVM with LSI for classifying game genres from textual data, improving accuracy in game market research.

Findings

Achieved approximately 70% accuracy with 95% confidence.

Used Latent Semantic Indexing to reduce dimensionality.

Validated model with 20-fold cross-validation.

Abstract

Game developers benefit from availability of custom game genres when doing game market analysis. This information can help them to spot opportunities in market and make them more successful in planning a new game. In this paper we find good classifier for predicting category of a game. Prediction is based on description and title of a game. We use 2443 iOS App Store games as data set to generate a document-term matrix. To reduce the curse of dimensionality we use Latent Semantic Indexing, which, reduces the term dimension to approximately 1/9. Support Vector Machine supervised learning model is fit to pre-processed data. Model parameters are optimized using grid search and 20-fold cross validation. Best model yields to 77% mean accuracy or roughly 70% accuracy with 95% confidence. Developed classifier has been used in-house to assist games market research.