Friday, October 14, 2016

DWTS Season 23 - Historical Strength

This Season 23 analysis is similar to last Season's 22 analysis.  First, job-age comparison groups are composed for each star.  The "job" categories come from the defunct "Cast Next Season's DWTS" game formerly on ABC's website.  The age range is the star's age +/- 5 years.

Historical results are scaled from 1-12 (representing 1st place through 12th place) for each season to make all results comparable regardless of field size.  Withdrawals and All-Star results are excluded.  The comparison groups are listed from highest/strongest average to lowest/weakest average:



Notes:  Age ranges were broadened for Laurie, Babyface, and Rick due to insufficient data.  Job categories were broadened for Amber and Terra due to inadequate comparison.  Height range was broadened for Terra due to insufficient data.

Here's a tabular summary of the group averages from the above spreadsheet, arranged in ascending clusters of comparable strength:


Here's a summary of Age-Job, Height, and Pro averages for each Season 22 star.  The count is the number of similar category comparisons.  Averages based on expanded category definitions (explained above) or limited pro experience are highlighted in red.


Finally, here are the overall weighted averages*.  They are arranged from strongest to weakest average, in clusters of comparable strength.  Wildcards are highlighted in red, indicating that the corresponding averages are based on just one or two data points, making them less reliable than other averages. Also marked as a wildcard is Terra, who is difficult to compare to previous stars.



*Technical Note:  The factors were weighted as follows: 50% Age-Job average, 30% Pro average, 20% Height average.  These weights were based on correlation analysis between weighted historical averages and actual historical results.

Personal Comments:
First, a reminder that these are not predictions.  Inevitably, some stars will beat their historical averages and some will fall short.  Considering that all 12 stars fall within a range of approximately 4th-to-9th place, this is inevitable.

This post was published midway through the season after the first four eliminations.  The first eliminated, Jake, way under-performed previous young actors in his age group.  OTOH, Rick, Babyface, and Vanilla were eliminated in relative order of their historical weakness with respect to the season 23 field.