Top 25 post-game assessment and analysis

Projection results

Name	WNTS Approval	Dialidol	Probability of Advancing (%)	Result
Eben Frankewitz	10	44.24	71.1
Chase Likens	32	20.99	70.2
Adam Brock	32	19.74	69.8
Jermaine Jones	51	14.57	68.5
Joshua Ledet	81	10.9	68.4
Jessica Sanchez	82	3.08	57.2
Elise Testone	84	0.12	54.5
Hollie Cavanagh	76	2.52	54.2
Skylar Laine	74	2.43	53.3
Shannon Magrane	62	2.22	47

The chance of choosing the top 10 correctly from the Top 25 at random was 40%. The model predicted, instead, 70% correctly, but missed badly on the top 3 men. Although the approval ratings would have suggested Eben was not going to be in the Top 10, his Dialidol score was truly humongous. Chase Likens and Adam Brock had nearly identical high Dialidol rankings, quite large, with performance approval that was rather low. None of these 3 made it through.

Before you start knocking me for including Dialidol scores (which I perhaps deserve), note that going just on approval would have made Creighton Fraker and Jeremy Rosado the two men who rounded out the Top 5 guys after Phil Phillips, Joshua Ledet, and Colton Dixon, so it’s not all bad. That would also have incorrectly knocked Jermaine Jones out of the forecast, and would have put Erika Van Pelt into the Top 5 girls, also incorrectly.

Fortunately, the model weighs these factors according to how accurate they’ve been in the past. So the top Dialidol woman (Brielle) was nonetheless still regarded (correctly) as not being in the Top 5 girls, because her WNTS rating was quite low. But no model that takes Dialidol into account is going to be robust to an errant Dialidol rating of 44.2 (for comparison purposes, Heejun registered a 0.24. That indicates that Dialidol thought that Eben did 184 times better than Heejun).

What happened to Dialidol this week? I confess I don’t know. When, last year, they kept predicting Scotty McCreery to sail through, I was incredulous. Sure enough, that proved prescient, as McCreery was a bulletproof contestant, advancing despite bad singing scores, and eventually claiming the title. So, you disregard Dialidol at your own peril. Except this time! I have no idea why Eben and Chase were so favored in the Dialidol sample. The service does more than just measure the busy signal, and actually measures votes from users, and maybe those users are disproportionately … what?! I can’t imagine.

As for Heejun Han, the evidence for his advancement to the finals is simply not there in the numbers. No number except pre-exposure indicated he would get through, and that alone is not usually enough. Indeed, Reed Grimm had a very large pre-exposure time, a nearly identical WNTS rating, and a larger Dialidol ranking, and was not in the Top 5 men. Go figure.

Giving credit where it’s due, the keeper of the Vote For the Worst Twitter feed correctly predicted all 10 of the vote winners. The power of a person going “on feeling” is in some cases very accurate, and this shouldn’t be shocking. If you had asked me whether I agreed that Eben or Chase would advance, I would have answered no. But I’m interested in predictability on a technical level, so I’m not going to juke the results until they match my gut. What would be the intellectual exercise in that?