In DataScienceSalon/mdb: Movie Rating Model and Predictor

Part 3: Research Questions

The purpose of this analysis was to determine the factors that make a movie popular, and to generate insights that would inform the key decisions studio executives and producers must make at the nascent stages of a project. Defining movie popularity strictly as box office success, came with its challenges. Since box office revenue was not among the available features, a proxy variable was designated for prediction. This raised the following research question:

Given the available data, which factor(s) is/are most associated with box office revenue?

Once this proxy variable was identified, it was designated as the dependent variable for multiple regression modeling, begging the second research question:

Given the available data, which combination of factors provide the best predictions of the designated proxy dependent variable?

Having identified a model to predict the proxy variable, the next challenge was to relate the predictions to box office revenue, leading to the third research question: