Daily Archive: May 11, 2011

May 11 2011

Top 4 projection: Women on top

Categories:

Post-Game, Predictions

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Disclaimer: The following analysis is more opinion than science. Moreover, it only projects what will happen if this season is like past American Idol seasons. Projected probabilities are just that, probabilities. Anything can happen.

Name Prior Average (4 rounds) Dialidol score Today’s Avg Probability of elimination
Scotty 53.333 24.337 50.5 0.30407495
James 58.666 14.711 57.0 0.21940829
Lauren 63.1666 15.676 63.5 0.14932903
Haley 71.666 11.954 63.0 0.06788917

Nobody tonight had anything close to a disaster. However, in an eyebrow raising move, James Durbin was placed in the statistically safest slots (first and last), had pyrotechnics, and sang a Journey song (previously not cleared for Idol).

Here’s what I think, and this is pure speculation. James isn’t doing nearly as well as people think. The week 2 rounds ago when the Bottom 2 was not revealed (only Casey was revealed to be gone), James was in fact the second-lowest vote getter. So, the model assigning him the second-most likely to go this week is anything but crazy. I buy it.

Whether or not I think Scotty will go home, if this season is like past ones, he should. My personal feeling, though, is that Lauren is in trouble.

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May 11 2011

Top 4 pre-game odds

Categories:

Pre-Game

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I’m actually not all that confident in James Durbin compared to where I was yesterday.

If I were to give my best guess as to the fit to the data, and assume that all contestants performed roughly how they did in the Top 5, then the model predicts the following probabilities (not normalized)

Name Prior Average (4 rounds) Probability of elim.
Scotty 53.333 0.323193
James 58.666 0.219311
Lauren 63.1666 0.164075
Haley 71.666 0.075083

Why is James higher than Lauren? He had a bad week. But, in fact, he’s had two bad weeks in a row compared with the other contestants. Lauren had one bad performance and one good performance. She was in the Bottom 2, and so may be running about 5 percentage points behind where she should have been. Scotty, on the other hand, has been running 5-10 points better than he should.

If you asked me my feeling, it’s going to be Lauren. The model predicts Scotty, then James.

Technical note: it may seem that I have been much more confident in the model in past weeks. There is a very good reason for this. Each round of American Idol decreases the total available data from week to week. In the Top 12, you have 12 pieces of data per season (in this case, about 110 data points). But in the Top 4, you have only 4 pieces of data per season. Yes, they sing 2 songs each, but we don’t get the response from individual songs—we only know the outcome of the vote, which was the result of both songs. As such, I only have 36 pieces of data to begin with for judging the Top 4. Factor in the fact that Dialidol only has results since Season 4, and you’re really operating on about 25 degrees of freedom for a statistical fit. And, well, that just adds up to a crummy statistical significance.

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