We just love data analysis – here’s a bit of fun answering the age old question, “Do you need to stay up to watch the second half of Eurovision voting?”
What a great 2022 Eurovision contest – it had it all – handwashing, yellow wolves and the UK coming second (or did I dream it all?). But we all know that 11:30pm feeling – is it really worth watching the second half of the voting or is it all over after the Jury vote is announced? To try to answer this, I’ve plotted the total amount of votes for each half of the voting on a scatter diagram;
Any country above the line did better than average on the Tele vote than the Jury vote, and vice versa. We know that Ukraine got an enormous popular vote, and it shows on the diagram. Two other countries that impressed the public but not the juries were Serbia and Moldova.
We can go further with statistics and ask the question; if we know the jury vote, how well can we predict the Tele vote? For 2022, this turns out to be a value of 48% (this is called “R squared predictive). This isn’t great (over 70% would be good), but it does show that there is some predictive power. But at 48%, I’m afraid the answer to ‘should I stay up’ is “YES!” – things can, and as we know, did, change.
For those of you wondering what might happen if we decide that Ukraine has some very special circumstances this year and maybe we should remove them from the data analysis, it turns out that the predictive% only goes up to 50%, so that hasn’t massively skewed our analysis and for future years it means we do need to stay up again.
If you have some data you’re trying to understand within your organisation, feel free to contact us below; simple or much more complex than Eurovision! We love a challenge at CQM.
For those who want the more technical background to this data analysis, the residuals were random and normal, the intercept was set at zero after finding it was not significant, the regression model itself was significant, and Ukraine and Moldova were the statistical outliers.
Raw data source : https://eurovisionworld.com/eurovision/2022