Access Patterns in Social Games: Detecting Cheaters in a Virutal Economy

This research internship is centered on the discovery of specific behavioral trends among vast collections of user data; more specifically,the identification of cheaters among a community of social online gamers. The current approach to fraud detection, taken by Backstage Technologies Incorporated, is highly manual and heuristic. We plan to experiment with modern data mining and machine learning techniques to more accurately identify cheating trends within a dataset. Further, we plan to implement a solution based on recent literature regarding code modularity and flexible design. From this research we hope to provide Backstage Technologies Incorporated with a solution that identifies cheaters with a high degree of accuracy, requires minimal human intervention, and is highly maintainable from a development perspective.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Yvonne Coady

Student:

Darren Minifie

Partner:

Backstage Technologies Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Digital media

University:

University of Victoria