The Ultimate Halloween Candy Power Ranking

The social contract of Halloween is simple: Provide adequate treats to costumed masses, or be prepared for late-night tricks from those dissatisfied with your offer. To help you avoid that type of vengeance, and to help you make good decisions at the supermarket this weekend, we wanted to figure out what Halloween candy people most prefer. So we devised an experiment: Pit dozens of fun-sized candy varietals against one another, and let the wisdom of the crowd decide which one was best.

While we don’t know who exactly voted, we do know this: 8,371 different IP addresses voted on about 269,000 randomly generated matchups.2 So, not a scientific survey or anything, but a good sample of what candy people like.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and their spinoffs come out huge here, taking four of the top 10 spots and appearing pretty synonymous with the platonic ideal of Halloween candy. The brand was the best-selling candy in the U.S. as of 2013, and market research showed it was the top snack-sized candy in Halloween times.

But what made some candies more desirable than others? Was it price? Maybe it was just sugar content? Nah, neither really. I pulled fun-sized portion sugar content from a series of dieting websites (FatSecret, MyFitnessPal), and in cases of particularly hard-to-find candies, I just went to the nearby drugstore. I pulled bulk prices from Candy Warehouse. After a spooooky regression with a truly hellish r-squared, there’s no evident link here between price, sugar and perceived quality.

So if it’s not price or sugar, there must be something about what’s in the candies that make some better and some worse. With the fervency of a stay-at-home dad who recently learned of a child’s mild peanut allergy, I scoured the internet for descriptive ingredient data about all the candies in our data set. Were they chocolate? Did they contain peanuts or almonds? How about crisped rice or other biscuit-esque component, like a Kit Kat or malted milk ball? Was it fruit flavored? Was it made of hard candy, like a lollipop or a strawberry bon bon? Was there nougat? What even is nougat? I know I like nougat, but I still have remotely no clue what the damn thing is.

With a full typology in hand and access to some of the most powerful statistical software available on the market, my questions were answered.

...

Full Text： FiveThirtyEight

若喜歡本文，請關注我們的臉書 Please Like our Facebook Page： Big Data In Finance