See original visualization here: http://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/26/markov-chains/
After finishing up my last post about modelling artists and their probability to release consecutive Best new music albums (see part 1 here), I got to thinking about what else I could use the data that I scraped. I had all album reviews from 2003 to present including the relevant metadata, artist, album, genre, author of the review, and date reviewed. I also had the order in which they were reviewed.Then, with Markov chains still fresh in my mind, I got to thinking, do albums get reviewed in a genre based pattern? Are certain genre’s likely to follow others?Using the JavaScript code from http://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/26/markov-chains/, I plugged in my labels (each of the genres) and the probability of state change (moving from one genre to another) which resulted in the 9 node chain at the top of the post. If you let the chain run a little while you will notice a few patterns. The most obvious pattern is that all roads lead to Rock. For each node the probability of the next album being a rock album is close to 50%. This is because not all genres are equally represented and also because of the way Pitchfork labels genres. Pitchfork can assign up to 5 genres to an album it reviews. With up to 5 possibilities to get a spot, some genres start to gain a lead on others. Rock, for instance, is tacked on to other genres more frequently than any other genre. This causes our markov chain to highly favor going to Rock rather than other genres like Global and Jazz which are not tacked onto other as frequently. So if you are the betting type, the next album Pitchfork will review is probably a rock album.-Marcello