Data Science Use Cases in Casino & Gambling Industry

The casino is an establishment with a mathematical edge whereas gambling is generalized betting which includes betting on horse racing. A casino typically allows certain types of gambling and may have some entertainment services, such as concerts, and sports. The states which allow casino has strict rules to maintain a uniform standard. Gambling is quite a generic phrase and usually betting on a horse is legal in most of the states. The casinos typically offer some traditional options such as pachinko, slot machines, poker, bingo to name a few.

We can say that they are “gaming industry” as a whole and deals with traditional structured data and unstructured data. Source of the structured data is from the transaction records, website visits and so on. Source of unstructured data is from social media, comments, video feeds, etc. Researches are showing that the casino gaming market is growing at a rapid pace at a CAGR of around 5%. There is a paradigm shift in this industry forcing to deliver a “casino resort experience” to attract and retain customers. With an increasing number of people gambling occasionally for fun is forcing to embrace analytics to attract customers with some new offer. Also, the casinos need to detect and prevent fraud, thereby analytics and machine learning is becoming their resort to predicting the fraudsters. We can say that the casino & gambling industry slowly becoming a data-driven industry and scope of the developers, professional engineers and entrepreneurs is increasing.

Game development

Data science is been used in the game development process to enhance functionality to keep the players engaged in playing. Data science can be used to build models to identify optimization and make predictions. Game design is becoming a popular area to build a career for the developers. Such game development is a complex process requiring various skills including skills of programming, data visualization, and animation. It is the creativity of the developers to build an interactive game insight from gaming analytics. Application of artificial intelligence is now among a key activity of game developers. Image recognition technologies are revolutionizing the gaming industry with object detection models. By combining motion capturing with data science is allowing to create virtual characters with more human characteristics.

Many of the reinforcement learning algorithms of today are related to dynamic programming techniques. The reinforcement learning algorithms do not need knowledge of MDP and they target large MDPs in the cases where the exact methods are non-viable. In online gaming and mobile gambling segment there potential usage of streaming data analysis to facilitate better business decisions. The skills of the developers as delivering some free spins! It is not astonishing that NetEnt like brands are offering big data marketing buying services to the gaming sector.

Personalized marketing

Like with any industry with an online presence, personalized marketing is actively been applied in the casino and the gambling industry as well. The marketers and the developers are trying to offer highly targeted interaction with customers to create meaningful marketing for the proper audience. The precise tailoring of the advertising assures which players are responsive to advertisements, their shopping habits to attract towards the casino resorts.

Predictive analytics and data mining identify the patterns and relationships which are too complex for humans to detect. The use of regression models, linear regression models, neural networks, decision trees and other data mining techniques can allow measuring the behavior of more than 100 different attributes.

Fraud detection

The threat of security is challenging all the industries. In the casino industry, fraud can be online and real life. As the action and decisions in gaming are fast, the fraudsters are increasing their high interest using modern technologies. Thus, the developers need to prevent fraudulent activities as a feature of their products to keep customer satisfaction higher. Artificial intelligence for betting software, brought numerous benefits that it just didn’t have a decade ago. One major step was the introduction of anti-cheating and anti-fraud systems has been possible because of the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Various techniques are used in this segment to avoid identity theft, which is quite common in the virtual world.

Payment fraud is also a challenge. The gaming companies are now assuring a high level of security to the personal information and transactions performed. Machine learning algorithms come to rescue the process of fast identification of suspicious activity. Making fraud detection much more automated and efficient is declining the rate of application of “old good” fraudulent methods.

Social media analysis

Social media data analysis can allow the industry to get customers insights to predict customers purchase decisions and brand loyalty. Also, the online social communities, comment to blogs, participation in surveys helps to tailor the product better.

Final words

The use of big data and business analytics has become the norm in this industry. By using analytics in the casino industry the casinos are now able to do micro-segmentation of their customer base and provide robust security. Already several larger IT companies including IBM and Microsoft approached this segment with their technologies. IBM has a case study highlighting the usage of IBM Watson IoT technology to assist the customers. Microsoft is long known for developing gambling and cars games. Slotomania Slots is one of well known free slot machines game. It is not astonishing that Microsoft is approaching with AI technologies to penetrate the industry. Although we mentioned about a couple of large software consulting houses, there are many startups and individual developers who became prominent in this industry by offering unique solutions.