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Allan J. Lichtman's election prediction system

washingtonpost.com

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: Allan J. Lichtman's election prediction system

#11

Man fits linear discriminant classifier on small, noisy set of data, finds it has 100% accuracy on entire set. Did not do any cross-validation to figure out robustness of fitting procedure or magnitude of generalization error. News at 11.

To be fair he claims to have developed the system in 1980 and then used it subsequently to predict elections. But you're right that the data is noisy and small. And he did get it wrong in 2000 by predicting an Al Gore victory. So 7/8 correct on the "test set."

Re: Allan J. Lichtman's election prediction system

#12
post #7

I have a bachelor's degree in political science* from AU, and Lichtman was my prof for one class. Suffice it to say that prolonged exposure to him is more than sufficient to cure a person of any notion that he is a genius who can see into the future. There is a tiny kernel of a good observation buried in his model, which is that the everyday "horse race" events that the political media focus on have very little to do…

So GWB won because of the dot com crash?

2000 is a fascinating case. You may recall that GWB did not win the popular vote.
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