Werderp, everyone. Ten bucks goes to the fact that you’re here because you don’t like my ranked list of Buckethead albums. Well, if you think that the list is bogus then you are probably right. BUTT!!! To be honest, it is really hard to collect dozens, or even hundreds (or in one case thousands [Colma]), of album ratings, average them all together, and guarantee that the numbers are the most accurate representation of the world’s opinions regarding Buckethead’s music.
When it comes to high-octane analysis like this, no one is perfectly right. The question we should ask is not “who is wrong and who is right,” but rather where the results fall on the “correctness” spectrum? On the very left of the spectrum falls the analysis that is not very thorough, not based on facts, has little data, and is full of bias. The very right of the spectrum is an analysis that is thorough, factual, and has little bias. The question we all should ask ourselves is the following: where does the analysis fall on the “correctness” spectrum?
To help you feel a little better, I want to show you what I did to get to the answers that I got to.
I managed to find a ton of album ratings from several places, but a few of the major sources are displayed in the image below:
After collecting all of the album ratings, I was able to average them all together (for example I averaged all of the Electric Tears album ratings together to get to the final Electric Tears album rating). HOWEVER!! Random albums like Pike 97, Passageways, only had 11 reviews, but Colma had over 1,200! Is it a fair representation of the population if you compare people’s opinion of an album with 11 reviews to people’s opinion of an album with 1,200? Well, yea, because Passageways came out way after Colma, right? Yes it did… in fact Passageways came out 15 years after Colma, but so did Hold Me Forever, a Pike that had over 300 ratings! So how do you make sure that a Pike with 300 ratings has a greater say than a Pike with 11 ratings? More people, larger sample size, greater representation of the true population, right??? RIGHT!
The way that you guarantee that a certain chunk of albums get boosted to demonstrate the proper representation of the entire population is through weights (or weighting). Not like dumbbells or weight lifting or anything, but assigning a greater value to a variable of higher importance. For example, Hold Me Forever is probably going to “weigh more” than Passageways because a lot more people were willing to review Hold Me Forever instead of Passageways. The weight essentially multiplies the total number of album rankings by a number that would reflect an equal subpopulation reviewing and rating EVERY Buckethead album.
Now that the whole weighting thing is out of the way, if we apply the weights based on what quartile the number of album ratings falls into, then multiplying them together gets us the FINAL order of album rankings. Dividing that number by the highest weight value standardizes them into what that album’s average rating best represents. Do that for every album then you have a list of what the world would most likely collectively rank each Buckethead album!
Where this analysis falls on the correctness spectrum, I’m not quite sure. Either way, I wanted to make sure that I got as close to the right side as possible. So if you still do not agree with my list, I invite you to make your own, and try to find a way to make your analysis get as far to the right side of the correctness spectrum as possible!