Non‐parametric Bayes to infer playing strategies adopted in a population of mobile gamers

Analysis of trace logging data collections of interactions of a heterogenous and diverse population of consumers of digital software with mobile devices provides unprecedented possibilities for understanding how software is actually used and for finding recurring patterns of software usage over the population that are exhibited to a greater or lesser degree in each individual software user. In this work, we consider an elementary mobile game played by a population of mobile gamers and collect pieces of game sessions over an extended period, resulting in a collection of users' trace logs for multiple sessions. We develop a simple, yet flexible, non-parametric Bayes approach to infer playing strategies adopted in the population from the logged traces of game interactions. We demonstrate that our approach finds interpretable strategies and provides good predictive performance compared with alternative modelling assumptions using a non-parametric Bayes framework. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.