u/dciscientist

Bluecoats this year put the 7th largest gap ever between themselves and 2nd place with a gap of 1.6 points, the largest since 2014 (which amazingly is not #1, although scoring changed a lot since the 70s). It's funny how there are two huge outliers near 2.5, both from completely different eras, and then the rest are clustered at and below 2. I don't if we'll ever see another >2 point gap, it doesn't seem impossible but it also doesn't seem particularly likely to happen soon.

Things have tightened up considerably now that prelims is over, but several close races remain: BD v Crown, Phantom v Blue Stars, Troopers v Spirit, and Crest v BK for the last finals spot.

The model still has Phantom over Blue Stars, but personally I feel like the momentum is with Blue Stars. I'd been pulling for Crown to take silver, and earlier in the season I thought they would, but BD changed my mind last night and I feel like they have solidified themselves into 2nd. Watching Spirit's late season surge has been awesome, and it will be exciting to see if they can push all the way into 10th. As for the race for finals, I'm really not sure who's going to make it but a new first-time finalist (Pacific Crest) would be pretty cool.

How do you think these close matchups will go? Or will there be even bigger surprises? If you're curious where these numbers come from, check out dcistats.com

There were some surprises last night in world class, here's how the finals outlook has shifted based on those results. Phantom more than doubled their chance of snagging 5th, Cavies are starting to look like a real threat for 7th, Spirit surged from 12th to 11th, and Pacific Crest is knocking at the door of finals. It's been an exciting season so far, can't wait to see what happens later this week! If you're curious where these numbers come from you can see more details at dcistats.com, I'm also happy to answer questions.

I marched drum corps a long time ago then got a PhD in physics. Now I built a neural network to predict future scores from historical trends, and this is where things stand as we head into finals week. What do you think? Who's going to hit expectations, and who's going to turn themselves into an outlier? Personally I could see Blue Stars in 6th, and Crown in 2nd, and maybe even Crest in finals, all of which sit around 30% (which isn't such a stretch).

Here are my machine learning model's predictions for tonight. It has Crest pretty close to Scouts! The model currently gives Crest a 26% chance of making finals, but that could definitely shift up or down a fair bit after tonight.

If you want more details (like finals predictions), or to explore historical repertoire & scores, check it out at dcistats.com.

My account is too new to post on the main subreddit, I'm hoping it might be OK here - I'm an alum from 2011, I do science and data stuff now and I built a neural network for predicting scores, I was hoping to get it done sooner in the season but it's finally ready and there's only so many days left to predict so I'm trying to get it out there as quick as I can. Here are the predictions for tonight, what do you think? I can share a link where you can explore scores yourself (predictions + historical), but I want to make sure that's OK first.