Age vs average score
Age vs mean score r=-0.53 across 367 celeb-seasons; 16–25 avg 8.30 vs 56+ at 6.09.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Across 367 celeb-seasons with ages in the Kaggle demographics file, age and mean judge score correlate at r = -0.53: younger casts score higher on average, from 8.30 (ages 16–25) down to 6.09 (56+).
Findings
- The slope is real but not destiny. Outliers matter: Laurie Hernandez (16, S23) averaged 9.22; Cloris Leachman (82, S7) averaged 5.76.
- Band means decline monotonically across the five age bands in the table below.
- S33–35 ages are mostly missing (Kaggle stops ~S32).
| Age band | Mean judge score | Celeb-seasons |
|---|---|---|
| 16–25 | 8.296 | 60 |
| 26–35 | 7.832 | 114 |
| 36–45 | 7.239 | 88 |
| 46–55 | 6.897 | 57 |
| 56+ | 6.092 | 41 |
Methods & caveats
One row per celebrity-season with non-missing age_during_season. Dependent variable = mean judge_mean across that pair’s scored dances.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
