Saturday, May 18, 2013

Liveblogging the Eurovision Final and a Bayesian Statistical Prediction

First up, the Daily Mirror is liveblogging:
22:22
The Twitter styles of the singers varies... Danish favourite Emmelie de Forrest and Sweden's Robin Stjernberg are sending repeated pleas for votes.
Finland's Krista Siegfrids is giving a flavour of the mood backstage. She says: "Everyone here is celebrating, dancing and singing along to every song. Awesome feeling! <3 p="">And Anouk of The Netherlands is playing it cool.

22:18
The singers have certainly been enjoying themselves in Malmo.
Ireland's Ryan Dolan tweeted: "That was the moment in my life ever!!"
We're guessing he may have missed out the word best...
He added: "Thank u all so much for the support. Love u all!! :D x"

22:16
How does the voting work? Well, a bit like penalty shoot-outs it's simple: Europe votes and the UK loses.
What actually happens is the 26 countries singing in the showpiece and the 13 who went out in the semi-final stages will all get to vote. A jury of six members plus the viewers' telephone will have a 50-50 stake in the marking.

The juries are made up of five people, including a chairman, and are required to "be professionals within the music industry and nationals of the relevant country". They watched the second dress rehearsal to cast their votes.
And from Cold Hard Facts (Friday May 17):
Eurovision 2013: Final predictions

This is post is part of a series of posts describing a predictive model for the Eurovision Song Contest. The full set of posts can be found here.
After Tuesday night’s disappointing result, I was somewhat worried about the changes to the model for this year, and considered reverting to last year’s model. However, this would be both intellectually dishonest and, more importantly, a lot of work, so I decided against it. In any event, the second semi-final threw up fewer surprises than the first, and the model did fairly admirably, predicting 8 out of 10 qualifiers. This is better than random by quite a bit, but not an improvement on last year’s model. 14 out of 20 overall is respectable, but nothing to write home about.
Let’s get this out of the way We now have all of the information we’re going to get before the final itself takes place on Saturday night. That means it’s time to make some forecasts.

As Macedonia failed to qualify, this will be the first Eurovision final since 1985 not to feature any (former) Yugoslavian entries. It will definitely be interesting to see what this does to the voting, as all of these countries’ points become up for grabs. The former USSR, on the other hand, will be there in strength, with only Latvia letting the side down. This is probably not great news for any of the ex-Soviet states, but Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan can probably weather the storm.
Winning probabilities
Now that they’ve qualified, Azerbaijan have retaken the top spot from Russia, and even extended their lead. This is probably because they’re better at drawing votes from outside the former Soviet Union, whereas Russia will now be competing somewhat with the other eight former Soviet republics. Scandinavia is also very well represented in the final, which may be a blow to the chances for everybody’s favourite, Denmark (now at an implied win probability of 55% on Betfair).
Overall, the chance of an ex-Soviet winner is a very respectable 47%: with nine entries, they must have a decent song in there somewhere.
Are you as good as you think you are? Of course, all of these probabilities are based on a very vague idea of what each song’s quality level is. The model hasn’t heard any of the songs, so there’s some very important information missing in these calculations.
It’s possibly more interesting to ask, rather than “who will win?”, “how good does a song have to be to win?”. If we have an answer to that, we can apply our own judgment to the songs which we hear tomorrow night....MORE
HT: God Plays Dice

Here's the Eurovision Song Contest official site.
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