Strictly at the movies : be prepared for a cliffhanger ending

Each week we rank Strictly contestants based on social media analysis. We call this the Strictly Sentiment score.

Strictly movies week and this time we saw a real cliffhanger ending with the final dance off place too close to call. But we called it anyway and got it right!

Sentiment analysis first though and Bill retained his very strong position at the top of the leaderboard. The big mover was Ranvir who jumped to second on Strictly Sentiment after her fab-u-lous foxtrot scored very highly with judges and public. We were very pleased that the sentiment model picked up her improvement. HRVY fell slightly behind on public sentiment but the big surprise was Nicola. From second on Strictly Sentiment for the last two weeks, her score fell heavily this week.

In previous weeks, Nicola scored highly based on her smile, sense of fun and being part of the first same-sex couple in Strictly history. It all changed this week as a weaker jive saw her score dive. 

When we ran the analysis on Sunday morning we were worried about Nicola's big drop in sentiment. We weren't sure whether this was right given that she has scored so highly in previous weeks. But it seems to have been validated by her position in the bottom two once the public vote was taken into account - remember the BBC does not release the results from the public vote so we have nothing to directly validate our sentiment model against. This is why we validate the model against the outcome once judges scores have been combined with the public vote.

Jamie scored well with the judges but this did not translate into his Strictly Sentiment score. He just isn't resonating with the public and we wouldn't be surprised to see him back in the dance off next week.

There is very little to chose between Nicola, Max, JJ and Jamie with all covered by only two Strictly Sentiment points. Impressing the judges will be key to their survival. 

Strictly Sentiment leaderboard

We think JJ is the interesting one as far as sentiment analysis is concerned.

He gets a comparatively small number of people tweeting about him but a high percentage of these are positive. He is still relatively unknown which dampens down his Strictly Sentiment score. There is a chance that as the public learn more about him his scores will increase.

We've combined the judges scores with the Strictly Sentiment score to show how the final rankings would have looked if social media rather than a public vote was used. As with the show itself we have assigned scores based on where each contestant ranks.

JJ and Jamie have the same Sentiment Score and so we followed Strictly's lead and given them the same ranking points.

On combined scores, Bill and Ranvir are top and Jason is cut adrift at the bottom. The final dance off position was very close between Jamie and Nicola with Jamie just slightly ahead.

Our prediction (tweeted before the results show on Sunday) was that Nicola and Jason would dance off. This proved to be correct.

We will do it all again next week. Don't forget that we tweet our prediction one hour before the results show on Sunday. Follow us on Twitter if you'd like to know the prediction.

Strictly Sentiment score

The Strictly Sentiment score is derived from a sentiment analysis of tweets. Using natural language programming and machine learning we classify each tweet as positive, neutral or negative. Tweets are filtered so that they only relate to a celebrity's appearance on the show rather than what they do in their 'day job'. Only tweets made between 7pm and midnight are included. This is to ensure that tweets relate to Strictly.

We then add up all the positive tweets for each contestant and assign a score between 1 and 100.  This score is based on the relative distribution of positive tweets. We do this to make it easier to compare and contrast Strictly Sentiment scores.