Mark's Notebook


	Only a mediocre person is always at his best. - W. Somerset Maugham

URDC Top 15 Predictions 2005 - Results

Wednesday 27 July 2005, 6:39 pm
Keywords: Round Dancing

Here are the actual URDC Top 15 for 2005, compared with our predictions:

Actual Top 15

15 - Hola Chica
15 - Cavatina
14 - Chilly Chilly Cha*
13 - The Old House*
11 - Java Jive
11 - Jack Is Back
9 - Sleeping Beauty
9 - Orient Express
6 - Adeline
6 - Boulavogue*
6 - Beyond
5 - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
4 - Beale Street Blues
3 - Jurame
2 - Papillon
1 - And I Love You So

Our Predictions

Adeline
All That Jazz
And I Love You So
Beale Street Blues
Begin To Color Me
Boom Boom*
Cavatina
Chilly Chilly Cha*
Dark Waltz*
I'm Still Me*
Jack Is Back
Jurame
Liebestraum No. 3
Orient Express
Papillon
Sleeping Beauty
Symphony
Warm and Willing

* Denotes dances that are new in the Top 15 this year.

We missed these dances entirely:

Hola Chica
The Old House
Java Jive
Boulavogue
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Our performance this year really sucked. Last year we were able to predict 14 of the Top 15, missing only Beale Street Blues. The new dances are the hardest to predict. In 2003 we were able to predict 13 of the Top 15.

Hola Chica and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes also ranked high on our lists, but not high enough.

One reason that the Top 15 is hard to predict is that our raw data does not include actual vote counts for the various events we tally. For example, I might know that "Papillon" was done at 15 different events, but I don't know how many votes it received at each of those events. The best I can know is that "Papillon" was in, say, the Top 7 at Bill and Carol Goss's week at McCloud, or it was in the Top 24 at Kay and Joy Read's week at McCloud.

If I were willing to do a factor analysis of all our tallies, I could probably figure out which events most accurately predict the URDC Top 15. But that's more work than I'm willing to do right now.

Mark's Notebook

URDC Top 15 Predictions 2005 - Results

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