To learn about the show's viewership, I fit a change-point type model with covariates similar to what I did in a previous post about LeBron James. And this story suggests that the season didn't get much better after the premiere, as the list of least popular episodes contains a good bit of season seven.įigure 1: Number of viewers for each episode of The Walking Dead If we plot the number of viewers against time, it sure looks like some fans tuned out after what happened to Glenn and Abraham. Now what does the number of viewers mean in the days of DVR and streaming? I’m not so sure, but it is a (crude) measure of the show’s popularity. The data that I downloaded from Wikipedia includes the number of viewers, so I’m ready to fit a model and look at how viewership changes over time. The season premiere seemed to rattle and upset a lot of fans, so I wondered if people stopped watching the show as a result. Now if you’re a fan of the show, you know that season seven of The Walking Dead got started off with a serious shock: Super-villain Negan killed fan-favorites Abraham and Glenn. We could go through topic by topic (and I encourage you to do so in the comments!), but I think that it is sufficient to say that as both a statistician and a fan of the show, I thought it was cool how well the topic analysis was able to recover the story arcs. After the prison is destroyed, Rick and his group are split up and eventually reconvene in Terminus, which we see in Topic 5. The first topic seems to come from the third season, where Rick and his group are inhabiting a prison and have to defend themselves against the nearby town of Woodbury led by The Governor. Looking at the first 10 topics contained in the descriptions of Walking Dead episodes, we can clearly make out a few of the major storylines that have unfolded so far. My colleague Laura provided a nice explanation of topic analysis in a recent blog post. Text Explorer provides another useful tool for looking for trends in our text data – Topic Analysis. As we can see here, even just looking at the list of common terms and phrases can give us a lot of information about the descriptions of each episode. We’re also reminded of the power struggle between Rick and Shane and the romance between Glenn and Maggie. Rick and his group of survivors struggle with Negan and the Saviors, encounter hordes (and herds!) of walkers, and try to protect their compound in Alexandria. The list of popular phrases reminds us of some of the major storylines in the show.
“Walker” is the term that many of the characters use to refer to zombies, so no surprise that it is near the top of the list. We see some of the other main characters like Darryl, Carol, the Governor, and Michonne. Rick is Rick Grimes, the main character of the show. It is more or less a who’s who of characters in the show. The list of terms shouldn’t be too surprising for fans of the show. After feeding the description of each episode into Text Explorer, the first thing I like to do is look at the list of most common terms and phrases.Ī list of common words and phrases in episode descriptions Text Explorer is a great way to quickly start exploring your unstructured text data. The Text Explorer platform was added in JMP 13, and it has quickly become one of my favorite parts of JMP. The first thing I wanted to look at was a summary of the episode descriptions. *****Spoiler alert! This is your last chance to stop reading before there are serious spoilers!***** The figure below gives you an idea of what my final table looks like: My data set includes information like number of viewers, writer, director, and a short description (a paragraph or so) for each episode. Using the Internet Open feature in JMP and a handful of table merges, I was able to put together a data set about The Walking Dead without much effort.
As I do anytime I want to learn about something, I headed over to Wikipedia and skimmed over the entry for the show. With the eighth season of the show about to start, I got excited to find and analyze some data related to The Walking Dead. While the zombies cause plenty of problems, we quickly learn that rival groups of survivors are the biggest threat to the well-being of Rick and his entourage.
The Walking Dead is a TV adaptation of a popular comic book series about sheriff deputy Rick Grimes leading a group of survivors through the zombie apocalypse. Walker, Biter, The Governor, Negan, JSS, Terminus – if these words raise your blood pressure like they do mine, then you’re probably just as big of a fan of the TV show The Walking Dead as I am.Īnd if you’re a fan of the show but haven’t made it through season seven yet, then now would be a good time to stop reading this post because there will be spoilers.