San Francisco Chapter of the American Statistical
Association Seminar
Speaker: Drew
Linzer.
Forecasting
Presidential Elections from History and the Polls
Thursday 5
December
4:30 - coffee and
snacks
5-6 seminar
Haviland Hall, room 2, UC Berkeley
A big story of the last presidential election
was the "victory of the quants" -- a triumph of data over intuition.
While traditional pundits portrayed the race as neck-and-neck, pollsters and
polling analysts confidently and accurately predicted that President Obama
would win reelection. How was this done? Drew will talk about the dynamic
Bayesian forecasting model he used at votamatic.org to forecast the outcome of all fifty states, as early as June.
Combining the results of nearly 1,000 pre-election polls -- representing over
700,000 individual interviews -- the site offered real-time opinion tracking,
state- and national-level forecasting, and commentary on the race. After the
election, Drew's forecasts were widely recognized as among the best of the
campaign.