Rating the Ballparks

In an attempt to rate the various Major League Baseball stadiums around the country, Nate Silver looked at the user ratings from online review site Yelp.  Noting that every ballpark has at least several hundred user reviews, Silver compiled the data from Yelp’s 1 to 5 rating system to create an ordering of the stadiums.  Once complete, the list creates a natural starting point to investigate questions like “Is ballpark satisfaction correlated with team performance?” and “How valuable is a retractable-roof stadium?”

Silver also provides the standard deviation for the ratings for each ballpark and explains the significance.  Standard deviation is a measure of the dispersion of data, so a higher deviation means more extreme ratings.

A great, fun little project!  What else can we rate using available user ratings?

Read the full article here.