Gambling Behaviour Pattern Analysis

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Project Motivation & Objective

Background

Gambling is often seen as a problem in society, no doubt gambling addiction poses a grave societal problem, however banning gambling is not a viable solution, for it would simply drive these activities underground. As such, our sponsor, Singapore Pools was set up by the Singapore government in 1968 to place gambling on legal grounds and to deal with the social ills tied to gambling. Ever since, Singapore Pools has been the sole legalized operator to run lotteries and sports betting in Singapore.

This establishment offers a regulated environment, one where the government is able to regulate gambling behaviours to some extent, by educate citizens about playing responsibly, within their meanings, informing them of the possible adverse consequence of gambling, therefore managing the risk of gambling problems. As a not-for-profit-organization, Singapore Pools donates a share of their revenue to benefit good causes on a regular basis, many of which have being made for the betterment of charity, education, health, community development, and sports sectors.

Singapore Pools offers 4 products to the public – TOTO, The Singapore Sweep, 4D, Sports Betting. These products and services are all regulated by Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Social and Family Development.

Business Problems & Motivations

In today’s globalized world, the Internet has transformed the gambling environment into a multifaceted, non-physical, multi-platform, environment without boundaries. This presents loopholes for illegal gambling operators to enter the market and draw our customers away, into their unregulated arena that is susceptible to the creation of gambling addiction issues.

Singapore Pools offers a safer outlet, one where players can bet responsibly, within their means. Attrition rates have be raising over the years, and this could meant that Singapore Pools’ customers are seeking other avenues to participate in gambling activities such as illegal online-gambling sites, which may lead to irresponsible betting. Therefore, within the next few years, our sponsor seeks to undertake a data-driven approach to promote responsible gambling by monitoring the player's’ betting behaviour and performance, in hopes of highlighting alarming patterns that could indicate signs of irresponsible gambling.

Our sponsor has actually been collecting user data for the past several years, but have yet put it to good use. Just a year ago, Singapore Pools had set up a customer insights division to better understand their customers through the analysis of these user data and their first step towards a data-driven approach to promote responsible gambling was to understand the gambling behavioural patterns of their customers.

Overview

The aim of our project is to allow Singapore Pools to better understand the gambling behaviours of their customers through the identification of gambling patterns, which can be unique across different clusters of individuals. Each cluster might have their own specific ways of splitting their bets, different churn rates, preference for a league, different decision making process, and ways of selecting their winning bets per match. Such behavioural patterns could possibly be linked back to certain demographics pertaining to the cluster, allowing us to further infer reasons behind their gambling habits, and hopefully could help us identify those irresponsible gamblers too. For the purpose of the project, the scope of our project is limited to the Sports Betting segment of their Account Customers.

The objectives of our project is to: (1) Profile their existing pool of customers through clustering analysis (2) Create a data visualization of the consumer betting activity (3) Build a dashboard to visualize the profiling and data points

General Rules of Soccer Betting

In soccer betting, the customer places a wager on any of the selections under a specific bet type (e.g. home team to win, total number of goals in the match equals to 3). If the selection corresponds to the winning selection as declared by Singapore Pools, the customer will qualify for the winnings, which are based on the prevailing odds at the time the customer’s bets are placed.

Project Data

As for the dataset presented to us, within the spreadsheet, each worksheet contains the entire purchase history of one player along with other recorded parameters, hence one worksheet itself holds the data of just one person. We would therefore need to aggregate all this individualized observations of betting patterns into one worksheet, and represent the relevant attributes of each player as a single row.

The parameters collected by our sponsor can be split into two distinct categories and include the following:

Demographics ID of players (NRIC) Gender of players Type of membership of players Home address of players Account Activity Date when bet was made Time when bet was made Type of bet made Soccer match info Team that player betted on Odds of the bet Amount of money betted Amount of top-up Time when top-up was made Returns (Winnings/losses)

Methodology

Our methodology and proposed work scope for this project are as follows: (1) Data cleaning (2) Data exploration (3) Data transformation (4) Cluster analysis & profiling (5) Relationship cross analysis (6) Creation of new player metrics (7) Wireframe dashboard & select display parameters (8) UX internal audit (9) Client consultation on dashboard (10) Application calculations & filtering (11) Dashboard prototype I (12) Dashboard testing & calibration (13) Dashboard prototype II (14) Dashboard final optimization (15) Client user testing