Style specialists: who owns the salsa, cha-cha, and paso?
Derek Hough leads residuals on Salsa (+1.575); Derek Hough leads paso (+0.903).
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Derek Hough’s Salsa posts the largest residual (+1.575 vs the style’s global mean, n=9). On paso doble, Derek Hough leads at +0.903 (mean 9.006, n=13).
Top residuals (min 8 dances in-style)
| Pro | Style | Mean | Style avg | Residual | n |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Derek Hough | Salsa | 9.065 | 7.490 | 1.575 | 9 |
| Derek Hough | Cha-cha-cha | 8.500 | 7.035 | 1.465 | 17 |
| Valentin Chmerkovskiy | Salsa | 8.906 | 7.490 | 1.416 | 8 |
| Derek Hough | Tango | 8.958 | 7.791 | 1.167 | 14 |
| Mark Ballas | Salsa | 8.600 | 7.490 | 1.110 | 10 |
| Mark Ballas | Cha-cha-cha | 8.127 | 7.035 | 1.093 | 19 |
| Witney Carson | Salsa | 8.552 | 7.490 | 1.062 | 8 |
| Maksim Chmerkovskiy | Cha-cha-cha | 8.089 | 7.035 | 1.054 | 15 |
| Derek Hough | Viennese waltz | 9.120 | 8.106 | 1.015 | 18 |
| Derek Hough | Rumba | 8.969 | 7.983 | 0.986 | 16 |
| Derek Hough | Foxtrot | 8.513 | 7.539 | 0.974 | 13 |
| Sasha Farber | Samba | 9.010 | 8.053 | 0.958 | 8 |
Paso doble leaders
| Pro | Mean | Residual | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Derek Hough | 9.006 | 0.903 | 13 |
| Valentin Chmerkovskiy | 8.994 | 0.891 | 14 |
| Mark Ballas | 8.744 | 0.641 | 15 |
| Maksim Chmerkovskiy | 8.472 | 0.369 | 12 |
| Cheryl Burke | 8.464 | 0.360 | 16 |
| Witney Carson | 8.375 | 0.272 | 8 |
| Karina Smirnoff | 8.045 | -0.058 | 11 |
| Emma Slater | 7.750 | -0.353 | 8 |
Methods & caveats
Residual = pro’s mean in a style − global mean for that style. Minimum 8 scored dances. Latin vs Smooth uses a fixed style family map.
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.
