Who Will Win Drums At DCI Finals? Predicting with Statistics

July 18th, 2014 by Robert Pottorff and Michael Dooley

This is the first article in a three-part series. Read part 2 here.

Most of the employees here have marched drum corps at one time or another (I think the last time we counted, we had nearly 30 years of DCI experience combined), so naturally it comes up a lot in discussion particularly during the summer. A really interesting question came up around the water cooler: is it possible to use math and data to predict who will win high percussion at DCI Finals this year? Robert has spent the last couple of days gathering, crunching, and analyzing the data from recaps all the way back to 1972 to come up with a prediction.

Let's cut to the chase and see the predicted rankings!

Cadets Blue Devils Cavaliers Santa Clara Vanguard Bluecoats Carolina Crown Phantom Regiment Boston Crusaders Blue Knights Blue Stars Madison Scouts Troopers

Here's the thing though - this prediction is far from foolproof. "You're only as good as your data" - and frankly, the data gives away one big secret: the ranks are just too close to call with even the best predictive model we could come up with!

The Data & The Analysis

The data included 326,000 individual scores and ranks, 1299 judges, 2621 shows, and 484 different corps over the course of 41 years.

Here you can see how average early scores relate to average later scores. The closer to the line - the easier the corps is to predict.

The numbers show that a highly ranked drum score early in the season nearly always translates to a highly ranked score late in the season (no surprise there), but Robert was only able to predict the score on Finals night within a margin of one point. That’s not very helpful when teams are separated by tenths of a point or less.

This is a screenshot of R Studio, one of the pieces of software Robert used to run the analysis.

Robert used a statistical method called a “Logistic Quantile Regression Model” which is designed to draw trend lines on data that has an upper and lower limit (0 to 20 points, in our case). The model looked at how early scores correlated to final scores in the Percussion caption each season, and then applied that same relationship to this year.

So, is it possible to accurately predict final rankings?

The short answer is "no", not given our current data. When we were brainstorming for this answer, some possible data sets came up that have never been documented (to our knowledge) like, "what was the average member age?" or, "who was on staff that year?" If we had all of that data, we might stand a chance of predicting rankings within a few tenths of a point.

The final outcome of each season is always hotly debated from May until August, and now we have mathematical evidence showing that rankings really can't be predicted. So get out to shows and support your favorite corps, because it isn't over until the last note is played!

As it turns out, ranking drums is not the only thing Robert could do with the data. One of the questions we asked was, "Are some judges easier or harder than others?" The answers may surprise you.

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