Recommending Teammates with Deep Neural Networks

The effects of team collaboration on performance have been explored in a variety of settings. Online games enable people with significantly different skills to cooperate and compete within a shared context. Players can affect teammates' performance either via direct communication or by influencing teammates' actions. Understanding such effects can help us provide insights into human behavior as well as make team recommendations. In this work, we aim at recommending teammates to each individual player for maximal skill growth. We study the effect of collaboration in online games using a large dataset from Dota 2, a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game. To this aim, we construct an online co-play teammate network of players, whose links are weighted based on the gain in skill achieved due to team collaboration. We then use the performance network to devise a recommendation system based on a modified deep neural network autoencoder method.