A Machine Learning Approach for Modeling and Analyzing of Driver Performance in Simulated Racing

The emerging progress of esports lacks the approaches for ensuring high-quality analytics and training in professional and amateur esports teams. In this paper, we demonstrated the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approach in the esports domain, particularly in simulated racing. To achieve this, we gathered a variety of feature-rich telemetry data from several web sources that was captured through MoTec telemetry software and the ACC simulated racing game. We performed a number of analyses using ML algorithms to classify the laps into the performance levels, evaluating driving behaviors along these performance levels, and finally defined a prediction model highlighting the channels/features that have significant impact on the driver performance. To identify the optimal feature set, three feature selection algorithms, i.e., the Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Random Forest (RF) have been applied where out of 84 features, a subset of 10 features has been selected as the best feature subset. For the classification, XGBoost outperformed RF and SVM with the highest accuracy score among the other evaluated models. The study highlights the promising use of AI to categorize sim racers according to their technical-tactical behaviour, enhancing sim racing knowledge and know how.