Interpretable Real-Time Win Prediction for Honor of Kings—A Popular Mobile MOBA Esport

Abstract

With the rapid prevalence and explosive development of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena electronic sports (MOBA esports), much research effort has been devoted to automatically predicting game results (win predictions). While this task has great potential in various applications, such as esports live streaming and game commentator artificial intelligence systems, previous studies fail to investigate the methods to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">interpret</i> these win predictions. To mitigate this issue, we collected a large-scale dataset that contains real-time game records with rich input features of the popular MOBA game <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Honor of Kings</i> . For interpretable predictions, we proposed a two-stage spatial–temporal network (TSSTN) that can not only provide accurate real-time win predictions but also attribute the ultimate prediction results to the contributions of different features for interpretability. Experiment results and applications in real-world live streaming scenarios showed that the proposed TSSTN model is effective in both prediction accuracy and interpretability.