prediction « Bad Hessian

Tonight is the airing of the final episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 5. They are doing what they did last season, which is to delay the final crowning until the reunion show. Apparently I wasn’t wrong last week when I said last time that they tape three different endings to the show, mostly to ward off Twitter leaks by fans in the audience. And apparently the queens themselves don’t know who won until everyone else does, according to Jinkx.

As noted by Ru on the final three episode and the “RuCap,” they encouraged fans to vote by tweeting and by reposting on Facebook. Although I can’t get Facebook data directly, I’m going to look at the Twitter data that I’ve collected. Before delving into the final predictions, I remembered that I have Twitter data from last year’s airing from the Twitter gardenhose. From that, we should be able to get a sense of who had the sway of public opinion on Twitter.

The graph below plots the last week of season 4, between the announcement that the queen would be crowned at the reunion, and the final reunion show. I chose to focus only on mentions of a queen’s Twitter handle, instead of using #TeamWhatever, because there weren’t many counts of those in the gardenhose. The first peak is the final contest show, and the second is the actual crowning.

The case here is rather clear cut — Sharon Needles leads everyone for nearly the whole time period. The raw counts of mentions show no contest there. I’m actually rather surprised that Phi Phi led Chad. Maybe there was another way they showed support for her?

       Keyword Count
sharon_needles  2538
   phiphiohara   877
 chadmichaels1   497

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(GIF via Dilettwat)

We’re down to the final episode. This one is for all the marbles. Wait, that’s not the best saying in this context. In any case, moving right along. In the top four episode, Detox was eliminated, but not after Roxxxy threw maybe ALL of the shade towards Jinkx (although, to Roxxxy’s credit, she says a lot of this was due to editing).

Jinkx, however, defended herself well by absolutely killing the lipsync. Probably one of the top three of the season, easy.

Getting down to the wire, it’s looking incredibly close. As it is, the model has ceased to tell us anything of value. Here are the rankings:

1         Alaska  0.6050052  1.6752789
2 Roxxxy Andrews  2.5749070  3.6076899
3  Jinkx Monsoon  3.4666713  3.2207345

But looking at the confidence intervals, all three estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero. The remaining girls don’t have sufficient variation on the variables of interest to differentiate them from each other in terms of winning this thing.

So what’s drag race forecaster to do? Well, the first thought that came to my mind was — MOAR DATA. And hunty, there’s one place where I’ve got data by the troves — Twitter.

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We’re in the Final Four now, the actual final four that matters (sorry sports forecasters).

Last week, Coco got the chop, which made sense statistically (she had a huge relative risk AND had been the first queen to have had to lipsync four times) and from a narrative standpoint — Alyssa got eliminated the week before so they didn’t really need to keep Coco around to continue all that drama.

So now the biggest question is who is getting kicked off this week and will leave us with our top three? Before I get to my predictions, I want to point readers to Dilettwat’s analysis, which, while uses no regressions, is still chock full of some interesting statistics about the top four and makes some predictions about who needs to do what in this episode to win.

For my own analysis, it’s looking very close here. Here are the numbers.

1  Jinkx Monsoon  1.2170057  1.5580338
2         Alaska  1.2509423  2.0045457
3 Roxxxy Andrews  3.2466063  3.3926072
4          Detox  5.5899580  1.5527694

Jinkx and Alaska are neck-and-neck in this model, and confidence intervals make pairwise comparisons rather hard to make here. But this order is the same as Homoviper’s Index.

Just to get a sense of how close this is, here is a plot that tracks the relative risks across the last few weeks.

Last week, Coco’s relative risk was incredibly high, the highest it has been. This week, Detox has the only relative risk that is indistinguishable from zero, which makes me think she’s about to go. Which makes sense — she’s the only one in the group who has lipsynced more than once. So all I’m willing to say more confidently is that Detox goes home tonight.

On a totally different note, Jujubee came to Madison on Thursday and I got a chance to tell her about my forecasting efforts when we were taking some pictures…

Then I saw Nate Silver at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. Unfortunately, there was not an opportunity for a Kate Silver/Nate Silver photo op. Maybe next time.

I’m scribbling this furiously because I had a busy weekend, but stay tuned for next week’s extra special analysis.

Last week, Alyssa got the boot and Jinkx kept her place. And I totally called it with my first model that accounted for the proportional hazards assumption. I think the model is having a little more success as the season plods on.

Before I get to the predictions for episode 10, there’s two really interesting prospects that may either give this model some more predictive power or become very interesting projects in their own right.

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Last week, Alaska took it home with her dangerous performance, while Ivy Winters was sent home after going up against Alyssa Edwards. This is sad on many fronts. First, I love me some Ivy Winters. Second, Jinkx had revealed that she had a crush on Ivy, and the relationship that may have flourished between the two would have been too cute. But lastly, and possibly the worst, both of my models from last week had Ivy on top. Ugh.

What went wrong? Well, this certainly wasn’t Ivy’s challenge. But it’s high time that I started interrogating the models a little further.
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Wow, last week’s Drag Race post made the rounds in the stats and Drag Race circles. It was cross-posted to Jezebel and has been getting some pretty high-profile links. A little birdy told me that Ms. Ru herself has read it. I think I can die a happy man knowing that RuPaul has visited Bad Hessian.

Anyhow, last week I tried to count Coco out. I was reading her like the latest AJS. The library is open. But her response to me was simple — girl, please:

(Also this happened. Wig under a wig.)

(both of these gifs courtesy of f%^@yeahdragrace)

Can that win safeguard Coco from getting eliminated? Let’s look at the numbers after the jump.
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This is not a post about Nate Silver. I promise. One of the more interesting and well-covered stories of the 2012 US Elections was the so-called “quants vs. pundits” debate that focused–unfairly, given the excellent models developed by Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, and Simon Jackman–on Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight forecasting model. I follow a number of social scientists on Twitter and many of their reactions to the success of these models followed along the lines of “YEAH! SCIENCE!” and “+1 for the quants!” and so on. There seemed to be real joy (aside from the fact that many of these individuals were Obama supporters) in the growing public recognition that quantitative forecasting models can produce valid results.
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This got posted at R-bloggers last night, after the men’s 100 meter Olympic event was over. Marcus Gesmann predicted Usain Bolt’s 9.63 second result within 0.05 seconds. Even better, he did it using a simple log-linear model that didn’t control for any other factors.

Check the original article at R-bloggers, which talks more about the progression of faster running times and includes the R code used.

Bad Hessian

Identity (Matrices) and Control (Flow)

Tag Archives: prediction

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Amazing prediction of 100m men’s final within 0.05s