Using sentiment analysis to predict ratings of popular tv series

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard of TV shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother or Game of Thrones. While I generally don't spend a whole lot of time watching TV, I have also undergone some pretty intense binge-watching sessions in the past (they generally coincided with exam periods, which was actually not a coincidence…). As I was watching the epic final season of Breaking Bad, it got me thinking on how TV series compare to one another, and how their ratings evolve over time. I therefore decided to look a bit further into user rating trends of popular TV series (and by popular I mean the ones I know). For this, I simply had to define a quick scraping function in R that retrieves the average IMDB user ratings assigned to each episode of a given series.