From an analytics point of view, varying your polling rate can lead to even more inconsistent data.
For example, a channel with ~100 concurrent viewers and polling every 5 minutes could very easily miss a lot of data when that channel gets a raid, which results in a burst of viewers but often a quick drop off, and for channels with a small number of viewers that raid can have a significant impact on viewership which polling every 5 minutes can completely miss.
Ideally you should poll as fast as is required for the application you’re developing (not all apps need per minute viewership accuracy), but not faster than the API cache (so polling faster than once a minute is somewhat of a waste, and polling too fast can actually increase erroneous data by hitting cache servers with older data than the previous request).