Data Visualization Articles

Seeing What to Do: Toward Visual-Centric Analytics

By Dr Richard Hackathorn

Businesses are facing extraordinary challenges dealing with the unexpected upheavals in today’s global economy. Doing business as usual is now a risky strategy. Businesses are forced to rethink their basic strategies and the core business processes for achieving those strategies. Read More.

Making Data Meaningful with Visualization

Interview with BIS² CTO Andrew Cardno and Linda L Briggs from TDWI September 2009.
Read More.

Layered data visualization includes a look at outliers.

Interview with BIS² CTO Andrew Cardno and Linda L Briggs from TDWI April 2010. Read More.

Super graphics make sense of a sea of data

Interview with BIS² Development Team Lead Jeremy Banks with STICK (science, technology, innovation & commercialisation KNOWLEDGE) Blogger Peter Kerr. Read More.

Time for BIS² to stop flying under the radar

Article by STICK (science, technology, innovation & commercialisation KNOWLEDGE) Blogger Peter Kerr. Read More.

SlotManager - Technology Must haves

Cheaper, faster and better, business intelligence systems no longer just nice-to-have solutions if you want to thrive in the new normal.

If there’s one thing that survived The Great Recession, it was intelligence.

by Charles Anderer. Read More.

Casino Enterprise Management (CEM) Articles

Articles co-authored by Andrew Cardno, BIS² CTO

 2011

• November 2011: "Where’s the Money? Part V: Gaming Density and Yielding the Floor."
  In our last article, we focused on the best use of gaming space from the casino’s perspective. This article continues to explore how gaming analytics and the right initiatives can drive incremental revenue by looking at a real-world example of how changes in the density of gaming machines impact game performance. Read More.
  
  
• October 2011: "Where’s the Money? Part IV: Gaming Density and Yielding the Floor."
  In today’s gaming world, there is vastly increased game flexibility and supply of gaming products in many, or possibly most, markets. These factors are changing the rules of yield on the gaming floor, necessitating a new framework for optimizing the yield of these games in this new environment. Read More.
  
  
• September 2011: "Where’s the Money? Part III: Horizontal Innovation in Gaming Machines, Gaming Software and Casino Architecture."
  In part 1 of this series, we briefly touched upon the power of horizontal innovation vs. vertical innovation when it comes to gaming product, and we illustrated how a smaller percentage increase in horizontal innovation is sometimes better than a larger increase in vertical innovation. In this installment, we’ll give some specific examples of horizontal innovation that are available today and look into the future at what may yet be to come. First we look at horizontal innovation within a vertical. Read More.
  
  
• August 2011: "Where's the Money? Part II: Data and Databases."
  This is part 2 of our “Where’s the Money?” series, which covers how money is made by connecting innovative gaming products to the customer. This article examines one more critical factor in horizontal innovation: analytics. In future articles, we will cover innovation of gaming product, innovation in the gaming hardware and architectural innovation. After we have completed these topics, we will cover how other yet-unseen forms of horizontal innovation may provide the innovation that drives growth in the gaming industry.  Read More.
   
• July 2011: "Where's the Money? Part I: Horizontal Innovation and Gaming Standards."
  This is part 1 of a planned 18-part series covering how money is made by connecting innovative gaming products with the customer. This article introduces the concept of horizontal products and the innovation that they bring to the whole gaming floor. When looking at horizontal innovation, we will examine two critical factors: innovation of gaming platforms and innovation of the connecting systems. We will examine a further four critical factors in subsequent articles, including innovation in analytics, innovation of gaming products, innovation in gaming hardware, and architectural innovation. Read More.
  
  
• June 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part XII: Where is the Money?"
  Over the last year, we have explored the analytical challenges facing the gaming floors of the future. These challenges are driven by a perfect storm of new gaming markets, technology changes and an increasing supply of gaming product. It is clear today that players have more choices of gaming machines and more choices of gaming venues. This article provides a recap of the six themes that we and the other authors of this series have discussed over the last year, then brings the series to close while introducing our question for the next year and beyond: Where is the money? Read More.
  
  
• May 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part XI: A New Kind of Gaming Metric"
  When looking at the gaming floor of 10 years ago, the metrics were - and rightly so - focused on the “real estate” that we had deployed. The industry (and at least one of the authors) would routinely look at the numbers that a box was producing and use these numbers to optimize the gaming floor mix. Read More.
   
• April 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part X: Hold Another Sacred Cow"
  Every slot operator knows the overall average hold percentage of the slot floor. On a day-to-day basis, this does a nice job of letting you know how lucky you (or your customers) were on any given day. Unfortunately, this number is often aggregated over longer time periods and then used to discuss the “price” of your games. However, this aggregation of hold often provides irrelevant and misleading data. Read More.
  
  
• March 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part IX: Clustering to Uncover Hidden Behavior - a Case Study of Silverton Casino, PT. 4 of 4."
  In the previous articles in this series,we focused on the combined high-level results of the Penny Alley mini casino at Silverton Casino and the product-based marketing initiative that followed, talked about the opportunities that secondary games bring to the casino and most recently, the behavior-based clustering of Penny Alley customers. This month,we’ll take a look at how behavioral clustering can uncover the hidden behavior in an otherwise similar group of customers, and how these similarities in behavior lend themselves to direct, product-focused marketing initiatives. Read More.
  
  
• February 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, PART VIII: Clustering: the Key to Understanding High-Dimensional Data - A Case Study of Silverton Casino, PT. 3 of 4."
  Previously, we explored the high-level business results from the combined“mini casino”slots and marketing initiative in Penny Alley at Silverton Casino. (As you recall, Penny Alley is an area of Silverton Casino that showed 1-cent games outperforming other games in the area. It is currently one of the highest yielding areas of the casino). We also looked into the effects of secondary devices and how these wonderfully flexible devices have been applied. Next month we will dig deeper into thebehavioral changes that were introduced with the Penny Alley promotion, but for now we will explore computing power and advanced statistical methods. Read More.
  
  
• January 2011: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part VI: Mini Casinos Meet Mini Games at Penny Alley – A Case Study of Silverton Casino, PT. 2 of 4."
  Secondary games are a remarkable addition to the gaming floor that offers operators incredible flexibly to change promotions in direct response to customer feedback. This kind of flexibility is a kind of prelude to the capabilities of downloadable games and other more configurable devices. Read More.
  
  

 2010

• December 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part VI: Mini Casinos Meet Mini Games at Penny Alley – A Case Study of Silverton Casino, PT. 1 of 4."
  The mini casino strategy, combined with the power of mini games, is a dynamic pairing.This article explores a real-life case study of how the Silverton Casino used nearly zero capital to deploy a mini casino on its slot floor that lifted net revenue by 10 percent.The case study looks at how the mini casino was designed, how product strategy was combined with marketing strategy, and how the results were analyzed. Furthermore, we open the door to how this mini casino strategy can be expanded into multi-game analysis. Read More.
  
  
• November 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part V: An Analyst's Guide to Slot Floor Optimization"
  In the August 2010 issue of CEM,we discussed the danger of averaging the performance of the gaming floor and showed an example how of averaging the performance of different types of games can lead to incorrect conclusions. Fortunately, gaming machines are heavily classified by type, and the type of game provides a very useful analytical grouping mechanism. In this article, we will assume that our slot floor consists of games that can easily be classified into groups via the game configuration. (In future articles we will explore whether we can apply multi-variant methods to classify multi-games devices.) Read More.
   
• October 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, Part IV: Can Multi-Theme Slots Change Players?, Part II"
  Based on the framework we established in“Gaming Floors of the Future,Part III,”we have gathered some real data to begin to shed some light on the answers to some key questions that operators face as they deploy multi-theme games.The burning question is, with multi-games available,will players change their behavior to play longer on a single device instead of the very short time-between-devices pattern that they currently exhibit? Put simply,do players spend more time on multi-game machines? Read More.
  
  
• September 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, PT III: Can Multitheme Slots Change Players?"
  "While we cannot predict the future behavior of customers, we have the good fortune to have access to real data that can be used to shed some light on this question. In this article,we define a series of behavioral patterns relating to play on multigames, and then we will lay out a statistical basis for various behaviors to determine if these behaviors exist and to what extent they do." Read More.
  
  
• August 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, PT II: The Download on Free Play"
  "The analytical challenge of free play is that once it’s cycled through the machine, the money is like cash to the player. And that player is free to keep playing with it, move it to another slot machine, buy a sandwich with it, or take it home..." Read More.
   
• July 2010: "Gaming Floors of the Future, PT I: Downloadable Games"
  "Almost all of the gaming machines today contain sophisticated software, a far cry from the humble spinning mechanical reels. The concept of centrally controlling the game configuration and the game seems like a natural next step for the technology. In fact, this step has, for years, been presented as heralding a future of increased profits. However, these profits can only be realized if operators are able to use these capabilities to change the way they run their gaming floor." Read More.
  
  
• June 2010: "Perspectives of Data: Financial VS. Slots VS. Marketing"
  "When analyzing a gaming floor, it is critical that we first find out what question we are trying to answer and, just as important, who we are answering that question for,as this impacts the data requirements. In fact, there can be more than one correct answer to the same question. For example, the answer to “How is my gaming floor performing?” will change quite a bit depending on who is asking.." Read More.
  
  
• May 2010: "Why do I need Math? PT. V: Skewness and The Player Experience"
  "As we have shown in previous installments of this series, the house advantage, or hold, is a poor indicator of the players’ experience. This means that discussions about whether to “tighten” or  “loosen” the floor should be taken with a proverbial grain of salt. Discussions about how the game play impacts the players’ experience are far more mathematically correct.." Read More.
   
• April 2010: "The Long and Short of It: Slot Games from a Players Perspective"
  "The slot game, originally intended as a diversion for table game players, became immensely popular and now occupies more than 80 percent of casino floor, producing about 70 percent of gaming revenues." Read More.
  
  
• March 2010: "Why do I need Math? PT. IV: A Second Look at the Rebate on Loss Formula"
  "In Part III of this series,we discussed an approximate formula for calculating an equivalent rebate on actual losses in baccarat.Now we will use a method of repeated random sampling called a “Monte Carlo simulation” to assess the accuracy of the results of this formula" Read More.
  
  
• February 2010: "Why do I need Math? Part 3: Gaming Interactions: The Invisible Force of Social Networks"
  "Authors’Note: This article, the third part of a series on the mathematics of gaming analysis, takes a look at the effects of social networks within a gaming floor.These invisible forces are a combination of actual social networks and subconscious behavioral patterns." Read More.
   
• January 2010: "Why do I need Math? PT I: Does a 25% Rebate Actually Equal 25%?"
  "Authors’Note: This article introduces the difference between game play and expected value, following from our CEM Blog series on the difference between actual and theoretical win. In this article, we show how mathematics and statistics play a crucial role in many of the marketing decisions routinely taken by the casinos to increase their base of loyal customers." Read More.
  
  

 2009

• December 2009: "Gaming interactions that drive profits:  Part 1: Fuzzy Spatial Association and Gravity Modeling"
  "This is the first in a new series of articles on gaming floor analysis; in these articles we will first discuss the analytical building blocks that can be used to decode the interactions between gaming devices on the casino floor.These building blocks include fuzzy spatial association rules, gravity modeling, visual representation, experimental design,mini casino management and social network analysis.This first article covers fuzzy spatial association rules and gravity modeling." Read More.
  
  
• November 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Who is Due Back (4)?"
  "So far in this series, we have looked at how due-back can be applied to measure and predict customer behavior. It was originally supposed to be a three-part series, but after receiving several questions from readers and comments on a CEM blog entry relating to how to measure effectiveness of marketing programs (www.casinoenterprisemanagement.com/blog/theoretical-win-taking-closer-look-sacred-cow), we decided to expand the series to five parts." Read More.
   
• October 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Who is Due Back (3)?"
  "In Parts I and II of this “Who is Due Back?” series, we looked at clustering techniques and how they can be applied to predict when a customer is “due” to return to gamble at a casino property. The clustering techniques were designed to de-average the customers and create different groups of behaviors..." Read More.
  
  
• September 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Who is Due Back (2)?"
  "This is the second of a three-part series on predicting customers’ “due-back.”Reliable prediction of when customers are due to return to the casino allows the marketing department to correctly select who to include in the next marketing campaign and to decide upon the right level of incentives to offer.This relies largely on segmentation, which is a mathematical classification system..." Read More.
  
  
• August 2009:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Who is Due Back (1)?"
  "In order to develop a predictive model, appropriate data first has to be collected. It would not be possible to collect data for modeling “customer due-back” without the loyalty cards now offered by grocery stores, DVD rental stores, movie theaters, and of course, casinos, to name a few..." Read More.
  
  
• July 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: How Golden Gate Beat 2008"
  "Gaming companies have historically made a huge proportion of their revenue from only a small proportion of their customer base..." Read More.
  
  
• June 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: MBA IV Quartal Analysis"
  "The growth of digitally stored data volume in the world is staggering—it is estimated that by 2010, the world will be storing more than 1021 (10 with 21 zeros) bytes of data, or 1 zettabyte (ZB) of data. This is roughly the number of stars in the universe..." Read More.
  
  
• May 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Turning Market Basket Into Action"
  "Understanding a gaming floor is like trying to solve a 20 dimensional Rubik’s Cube. No matter how you twist the cube, there are always hidden dimensions that are the hidden drivers in analyzing the data..." Read More.
   
• April 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: The Art of Statistical Clusters building and forecasting"
  "Personal computers, introduced in 1976, cost thousands of dollars and had a few kilobytes of RAM, no hard drive, and process speeds reaching 1MHz. Today, desktops with 2 gigabytes of RAM, 250 gigabytes (GB) of hard disk drive space, and 2 GHz of processing speed cost around $500, and comparable laptops are available for about the same price..." Read More.
  
  
• March 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Smashing Boundaries with Internet Protocol"
  With the adoption of Internet protocol (IP) in gaming, the ubiquitous Internet connects everything to everything. In the past, the server could only talk to specifically wired hardware sitting next to it in the same room. Now a server can be anywhere in the world and every electronic gaming device can be linked to it..." Read More.
  
  
• February 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Using Demographics and Spatial Information"
  "It is commonly thought in the gaming industry that it is difficult to find a usable profile of a gambler. There is, however, some literature available on the subject..." Read More.
   
• January 2009: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Recovering Mr Benedict's Money"
  "Previously, we looked at a small data set from a small casino that had two categories of slot machines, a table game, and a hotel. Although some interesting conclusions could be drawn from the simple example, market basket analysis (MBA) really shines when dealing with data sets that have a large number of cases and variables..." Read More.
  
  

 2008

• December 2008:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Let's Talk Turkey. Applying Retail Market Basket Analysis to Gaming"
  "Imagine a customer pushing a steel grocery cart (with its frontwheel wobbling, of course) through any one of Las Vegas’ luxury casinos. But instead of filling it with frozen vegetables,milk and meats, casino customers fill it with sundries, gifts, restaurant foods and beverages, lodging, and wagering products..." Read More.
  
  
• November 2008:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: The Math that Gaming Made"
  "It is common knowledge that the Theory of Probability is the basis of all casino games.Before any game can be put on a casino floor, the house advantage or the expected value (EV) of the gamemust be calculated..." Read More.
  
  
• October 2008:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Searching for a Simpler World"
  "People are curious about what the future looks like, and businesses want to predict it. Technology today has advanced so much that the products and services that were once considered magic are now in every adult and child’s hands..." Read More.
   
• September 2008: "Casino Enterprise Magazine: The Petabyte Era of Gaming"
  "The volume of data in the world is increasing at an extraordinary rate. This growth rate is so staggering that we now  consider it possible only to estimate the total volume and the potential end point..." Read More.
  
  
• August 2008:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: Gaming an Endless Fountain of Cash"
  "It is our hypothesis that the slot machine gaming market reaches saturation when the number of people per slot machine approaches 100 in the population..." Read More.
  
  
• June 2008:  "Casino Enterprise Magazine: No Recession in Las Vegas"
  "The media has been huge on the topic of recession in Las Vegas recently, describing how the downturn may have affected local businesses..." Read More.