Survivor

Timeline: April 2018
Created For: NETS150 Final Project.

This is the my final project for a class I took the second semester of my sophomore year. The class focused on different networks, such as social networks, or the Internet. For our final project, we had to come up with something that had combined different concepts we had learned in class. I chose to study the social networks of the popular reality TV series, "Survivor". Using this analysis, I came up with a general strategy for winning Survivor, based on past winner behavior.

I webscraped data from the Survivor Wikipedia Page, using JSoup and Regex matching. I then stored the data into a matrix which I used to represent the social graph. I analyzed overall edges, homophilly and votes made against the winners and other top players to analyze the social behavior of the winner. I concluded that a good strategy would be to for an alliance with other players, but not too many as the bigger ones tended to collapse much easier. Based on Homophilly Data, players should first try and make alliances with people of similar ages, rather than sex. Finally, although they need to have a strong alliance, they also need to be well liked by almost all the players, as winners usually had the lowest amount of votes against them for the entire season.