An Efficient Sampling Method for Television Ratings and its Application to Taiwan Cable TV Channels

Television rating is an important feedback mechanism because its results greatly affect the immense profits of Television companies, advertisers and program producers. Program rating with advertising impact has become a key factor in the value of program time. It is desirable to estimate the program ratings fast, economically and accurately. Therefore, how to select the samples for Television rating investigation plays an important role in predicting program ratings. The sampling problem is essentially a bi-objective optimization problem, which minimizes the number of samples and minimizes the error of program rating. In this study, the authors have proposed an efficient sampling method for selecting samples from a large number of sub-areas. In this study, the sampling method is applied to Taiwan Cable Television Channels in Taipei and Taiwan. The experiments show that, Television rating error of the proposed sampling method is smaller than that of using the same number of sub-areas with the largest Television ratings.