Warning: maaaaaaajor geekery ahead! A closer look at Doctor Who ratings

May 09, 2013 23:18


OK so I like math. Although I'm not a statistician, I am pretty good with math (which is lucky for anyone in the USA haha bc in a few short months I will be using said math to prepare intravenous drug compounds for hospitalized patients... tl;dr if I sucked at this, it would suck WAAAY worse to be you bwahahah XD)
ANYWAY! It should not have escaped ( Read more... )

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Comments 68

ebarton May 10 2013, 14:04:05 UTC
I'd be interested to see how season 3 stacks up when looked at on it's own - this was surely the weakest season of the RTD era so it seems more natural to compare the weakest season of the moffat era to that rather than s1-4 combined.

And I reckon the last two episodes of 7.2 will definitely be a help to the ratings... hopefully anyway!?

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kilodalton May 10 2013, 20:56:58 UTC
Yeah I'll definitely keep tracking s7 to see where things end up vis a vis the others - truth be told, s5 and s6 were pretty flat overall in terms of ratings so I'm not hopeful for much of a bump but who knows!! =)

Re s3 ... LOL THAT'S MY FAVORITE ONE!! I thought s2 was the weakest personally, and that s5 and s6 were weaker than s7 - just goes to show haha!!!

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ebarton May 10 2013, 21:24:49 UTC
Ha! Yeah it is all a matter of taste and preferences. Here's hoping for an end to s7 that we both enjoy!

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kilodalton May 10 2013, 21:37:30 UTC
Here's to that!! =D


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kilodalton May 10 2013, 20:57:35 UTC
Why ty!! =D

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bloose09 May 10 2013, 17:26:39 UTC
I am a card carrying Aerospace Engineer and I, too, approve this post!

It is all about the trends and they certainly do not look good. Viewers mean sponsors, and sponsors mean money. You do not need an engineering degree to figure that one out. It also shows that established viewers are leaving the show faster than new ones can find it. That is something that the BBC will certainly understand and have to address.

No matter what the Moff does for the 50th, it is bound to be a ratings bonanza. Once he blows his wad on that episode, he can safely leave and claim that everything was perfect when he handed over the reins. It is the perfect time to leave and blame the next person for the slip in ratings. He is in a win-win scenario because it happens to be 2013.

Thank you for this post :)

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kilodalton May 10 2013, 20:58:34 UTC
Why thank you! And totally agreed!

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eve11 May 10 2013, 18:21:20 UTC
Sorry, I am a card-carrying statistician and all I see is a general trend for all seasons, bucked by the end of season 4 with its specials ( ... )

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eve11 May 10 2013, 18:37:31 UTC
My mistake, it's the end of series 4 (not the specials) that is the outlier. eg, Turn Left, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End.

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hammard May 10 2013, 18:42:28 UTC
Thanks for your post! I agree totally and have done some other posts on it.

The difference in perceptions between us Statisticians and them Engineers ay ;)

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kilodalton May 10 2013, 21:18:35 UTC
Eh for s7 I'll keep updating the data as it comes in and repost accordingly. But s5 and s6 are fairly flat, and with the same number of total eps so I'm not holding out much hope there. But we'll see ( ... )

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hammard May 10 2013, 18:41:07 UTC
You should read Tom Spilsbury's post on this subject he did back during Season 6 where he analysed ALL the ratings and showed the change was very little:
http://tomspilsbury.moonfruit.com/#/home/4554491282/Let%27s-Kill-This-Myth/195123

Whilst we cannot analyse all the recent ratings in this way due to lack of data (Iplayer stats will not be available for a while) it is probable to be the same.

What the figures are possibly mapping is the move from TV to online watching (just as the strong downwards trend from S1 to S2 tracks people moving to repeat vieiwings ( ... )

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eve11 May 10 2013, 19:39:58 UTC
Another interesting story would be to start with eg, episode 4 in each series, and plot the quadratic curves point by point as you gain new points with each new episode, and see how much the prediction changes with the next new data point. The future predictive trend depends rather massively on where it estimates the inflection point.

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kilodalton May 10 2013, 21:08:08 UTC
Eh Spilsbury's post is kind of what I was saying about people who just look at the raw data and don't look for any statistical significance or trendlines. (And besides the trendlines, I went so far as to run a one-tailed T-test: Spilsbury is wrong. Season ONE is the outlier and is statistically significant, not season 4 -- see what I mean about misleading data on the surface?) Not that I'm surprised though - he makes his living off DWM, what the heck is he supposed to say lol ( ... )

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eve11 May 10 2013, 21:16:36 UTC
Can you explain to me what you mean by "Season 1 is statistically significant?" Do you mean the average ratings for season 1 are statistically significantly different from other seasons? You have 13 correlated data points in a temporal trend, and I'm willing to bet that whatever calculation was done in terms of a simple t-test for statistical significance is making assumptions that the data populations do not follow in this case.

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