Top 8 redux projection

Updated 12:00 PM EST. Dexter jumps two spots, Jena and Jessica fall a bit, and Alex gains.

Update: 5:14 PM EST. Large drop for Sam Woolf relative to everyone else. No change in 3 most likely, but Dexter moves to third most likely.

Note that Votefair results have been slow to come in recently, and so these rankings are apt to change as the day goes on. In particular, Alex’s fans tend to pull him up later in the day.

So here’s the dilemma: the way I would normally model this round would be to factor in the figure from Dialidol at a moderate level. Dialidol has frequently shown so-so performance early in the year, and gotten better as weeks went by, until it’s quite accurate in the Top 5-Top 2. This year, with rule changes that make phone dialing nearly obsolete, something quite interesting has happened:

Dialidol so far has been anti-correlated with the results. That is, the person with a high score (and this year, they have been huge) has never been safe. Now, that’s only a sample set of 3, and unless you had a prior belief that the indicator had gone wacky, it’s no reason to change your behavior. But it’s enough to be quite suspicious now since, let’s be fair, we already had good reason to suspect Dialidol may be D.O.A. in 2014. As such, I’ve severely discounted Dialidol in the above numbers.

Dexter has certainly been underrated by the model so far. It’s projected him among the three most likely to be in the bottom 3 nearly every week, but he’s only been there once.

Sam had fairly good numbers last week, and we know he was the lowest vote-getter, which was mildly surprising but nowhere near shocking. His numbers today are also decent, and he’s likely safe.

The following is a bit technical:

Jena and Alex are definitely the most polarizing contestants. Though I rarely quote the statistic, WNTS releases the standard deviation of their sample in addition to its mean. The standard deviation is roughly thought of, in many contexts, as the width of a bell curve. In the normal distribution, one standard deviation encompasses around 2/3 of all the results. If your results are either Yes (approve) or No (disapprove), it’s not quite as straightforward to interpret. What it means in this case is that if you polled 100 people about whether they liked Alex’s version of “Every Breath You Take”, you will get a number, such as 56, that did like it, and 44 that did not. If you do that over and over again, with different sets of people, you get a range of numbers. Sometimes only 30% liked it, other times 70% liked it. The standard deviation in this context is the width of that range of numbers, which is an indication of something which there is a lot of disagreement about. (You can read my explanation of how polling works here and here.)

Alex and Jena had the highest standard deviation tonight, 24 and 27 respectively. So, though Alex’s approval rating as measured by WNTS is nominally 68%, in reality we can only be confident that it’s between 41 and 95! This doesn’t really help with our predictions, it only tells us we should be cautious about the figure. One part of the “probability” part of the above projection is this caution, though not the only part.