The 85th annual Academy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on February 24th and many of us who will be watching it on TV will try to see if Seth MacFarlane can pull off the always hard hosting duties. Some other folks are waiting to see of all six James Bond movie actors might show up on stage at once, as the rumor mill claims.
However, some people who watch the Oscars will in fact be interested in seeing who wins the awards. Among them is David Rothschild of Microsoft Research, who is using his data analysis work to try to predict the winners later this month. Microsoft says that he has also teamed up with the Office division to release an Excel app for Office 2013 called Oscars Ballot Predictor that aims to offer real time updated predictions of the Oscar winners.
For the 2012 US Presidential elections, Rothschild correctly predicted the outcome of all of the states and the District of Columbia, save for one. The Oscar ballot is a much smaller data group; only 6,000 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members vote. Rothschild states:
For the Oscars, there is no polling, and fundamental data—box-office returns, movie ratings—are not statistically effective. I focus even more heavily on prediction markets, which are very robust, but I also include some user-generated data that helps me learn more about correlations within movies and between categories, such as, ‘How many categories will Lincoln win?’
At the moment, he is predicting that Argo has a 92 percent chance of winning Best Picture, and that Daniel Day-Lewis has a 99 percent chance to win Best Actor for Lincoln. Steven Spielberg has an 89 percent chance to win Best Director for Lincoln but Jennifer Lawrence just has a 71 percent chance to win Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft