A First Look At The First Week Predictions

Tonight, the first episode of Season 11 of RuPaul’s Drag Race airs, which means it’s the first chance for the teams in the RuPaul-Predict-a-Looza to test their model mettle.

The McElwee Influencer model predicts that Vanessa Vanjie Mateo wins and Ra'Jah D. O'Hara goes home. It uses Twitter and Instagram followers.

The Wisdom Of The Crowd predicts Silky Nutmeg Ganache wins and Soju goes home. It uses a survey of fans conducted each week.

Shira Mitchell’s model predicts Plastique Tiara wins and Shuga Cain goes home. Mitchell fit a multilevel, conditional logistic regression model with with age, past wins, and a coefficient for each contestant.

Bayes the House Down predicts Brooke Lynn Hytes wins and Nina West goes home. The model uses a Naive Bayes Classifier using age, hometown, past performance on the show, and episode position as features.

And everyone’s favorite Council Speaker Corey Johnson predicts that Ra'Jah D. O'Hara will go home. In a statement to Data for Progress he said, “From what I’ve seen of her papier mache look, I have to think Ra’Jah O’Hara will be the first queen to sashay away this season,” CoJo tells the newsletter.

Read Hanna Haddad’s (@hannnnanana) breakdown of what we learned from surveys.

Submit your model here. There is still time to submit before the first episode and if you aren’t ready by today *you can join next week*! If a team does not submit for an episode, it counts as an incorrect prediction. Since early episodes have many contestants and little information for prediction, most teams are likely to get them wrong anyhow. So folks can catch up in later weeks.