Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar is on top of the Score Trends India popularity charts post the release of his most anticipated film PadMan, Kumar surprisingly has surpassed the heartthrob Ranveer Singh, who held the No. 1 position since past 3 week for his raw and maniacal performance in Padmaavat.

After Akshay and before Ranveer are Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan respectively in second, third and fourth positions in the Score Trends current list.

These statistics are authenticated and researched by the US-based media tech startup Score Trends India.“We collect data from over 600 news sources across 14 languages in India to analyse the media from Thursday to Thursday,” explained Ashwani Kaul, co-founder of Score Trends.

“These include Facebook, Twitter, print publications, viral news on social media, broadcast and digital platforms. Various sophisticated algorithms then help us to process this massive amount of data and arrive at the scores and rankings of Bollywood stars.”

According to the Score Trends India statistics, Akshay who was in the third position for the period February 1 to 8, with a score of 57.67 points, shot up to 94.50 points for the period February 8 to 15 registering a growth of 36.83 points. And Ranveer, who was riding high at No. 1 position for the period February 1 to 8 with 78.11 points, fell to fifth position with a score of 37.49 points – a loss of 40.62 points.

What worked in Akshay’s favour is his soaring popularity on Facebook, Twitter, viral news, newspapers and digital sites in the countdown to PadMan’s release.

Whereas Amitabh Bachchan, who is in the second position for the period February 8 to 15 with 65.46 points, was at No. 4 for February 1 to 8 with 51.36 points. The veteran actor registered a growth of 14.1 points to climb up two spots. And the reason for his rising graph on all the same media platforms is the announcement of his forthcoming film Jhund.

Explaining how data and algorithms play a huge role in the media tech space at Score Trends, Ashwani Kaul said, “Automated algorithms provide an unbiased score to each celebrity based on numerous factors. Cutting edge technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are used to clean and associate data with ‘Salman Khan’ the actor as against ‘Salman Khan’ from Khan Academy. The summarised data then passes through various quality controls which include human verification of each of the parameters every week before the scores are published.”