A systematic review of data-driven approaches in player modeling of educational games

Recent years have seen growing interest in open-ended interactive educational tools such as games. One of the most crucial aspects of developing games lies in modeling and predicting individual behavior, the study of computational models of players in games. Although model-based approaches have been considered standard for this purpose, their application is often extremely difficult due to the huge space of actions that can be created by educational games. For this reason, data-driven approaches have shown promise, in part because they are not completely reliant on expert knowledge. This study seeks to systematically review the existing research on the use of data-driven approaches in player modeling of educational games. The primary objectives of this study are to identify, classify, and bring together the relevant approaches. We have carefully surveyed a 10-year sample (2008–2017) of research studies conducted on data-driven approaches in player modeling of educational games, and thereby found 67 significant research works. However, our criteria for inclusion reduced the sample to 21 studies that addressed four primary research questions, and so we analyzed and classified the questions, methods, and findings of these published works, which we evaluated and from which we drew conclusions based on non-statistical methods. We found that there are three primary avenues along which data-driven approaches have been studied in educational games research: first, the objective of data-driven approaches in player modeling of educational games, namely behavior modeling, goal recognition, and procedural content generation; second, approaches employed in such modeling; finally, current challenges of using data-driven approaches in player modeling of educational games, namely game data, temporal forecasting in player models, statistical techniques, algorithmic efficiency, knowledge engineering, problem of generalizability, and data sparsity problem. In conclusion we addressed four critical future challenges in the area, namely, the lack of proper and rich data publicly available to the researchers, the lack of a data-driven method to identify conceptual features from log data, hybrid player modeling approaches, and data mining techniques for individual prediction.