Nate Silver, Microsoft Research Predict the Oscars

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday February 24, 2013 @11:55AM from the just-as-arbitrary-as-the-presidential-election dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Nate Silver, famous for applying rigorous statistical methods to U.S. political elections, has focused his predictive powers on a somewhat more lighthearted topic: this weekend's Academy Awards. As part of his predictive analysis, Silver rounded up the various awards that precede the Academy Awards, including those from the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild; in his calculations, he gave additional weight to those awards with a higher historical success rate, and doubled the score 'for awards whose voting memberships overlap significantly with the academy.' But he isn't the only statistician predicting this year's Oscar winners: David Rothschild, a member of Microsoft's massive research division, has also developed a data-driven model. What does their number-crunching predict? That Argo will win Best Picture, and a bunch of people will win other things."

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Not wanting to point out the obvious but... by tuppe666 · 2013-02-24 12:41 · Score: -1, Offtopic

...Microsoft have had there behinds kicked around so badly, that when they describe new technology they describe the pack of 4 "Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon", you would have thought with all this analysis, they could done better with the internet[all of it], social media, smartphones, mp3 players, tablets...all their money still comes from Office/OS.
So colour me not so impressed