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Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

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Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#231
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think polls being more representative of turnout amongst minorities could help indicate a potential black swan event for the election. If turnout does return to 2008 and 2012 election levels, polls featured in this fivethirtyeight article [1] indicate Trump is performing better amongst black and hispanic voters. Both demographics are seeing a 10-15% swing in support for Trump compared to 2016, which could theoretic…

You're misreading or confused or something. The 538 piece points to a ~10% swing away from the (in the case of black voters) 82% that favored Hillary. This is very different from a swing all the way to a 10% preference for Trump. A bigger turnout by (these) minority voters, assuming they cast votes even vaguely in line with this polling, is more votes in Biden's column than Trump's. That's bad news for Trump.

I think you're misreading my statement, it's a 10% swing in the direction of Trump, not a 10% overall preference for Trump. From 82% favoring Hillary to 71% favoring Biden for black voters. That's a 10% change towards Trump's direction. If 16 million black voters participated in 2016 then that's around 13.1 million votes for Hillary and 2.9 million for Trump. If polling is correct this year and we see around similar turnout (not even an increase), then it'll be around 11.3 million votes for Biden and 4.7 million for Trump. So a 1.8 million vote swing in the black vote.

That's just a really rough calculation and doesn't account for the Hispanic vote either in that article.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#232
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point, I live in a conservative-leaning area of a purple/blue state. Along my normal driving routes I had seen quite a few, but over the past few weeks they have mostly been taken down (in every case, other republican candidate signs still stand). Scenario one, Trump supporters supported him all the way up until now, enough to donate to his re-election campaign to buy a yard sign, and in the final weeks of…

Similar to how "not every Trump Voter is a >>Proud Boy<<" not every Biden supporter is a yard-sign stealing communist. Actually the extremists are in the minority in both groups. If you start going down that road and base your vote on how bad the worst people on the other side are, democracy is pretty much collapsing already.

Sure - I am above my quota for politics posts on HN but since this article is about problematic tail behavior I'll go ahead anyways. You are right that probably a very small minority of Trump opposers are actually stealing yard signs. However, a larger component are advocating for censorship of opinions and facts that disagree with their worldview, and many more will readily shut down any opposing discussion about immigration policy or international trade, supporting police, or even simply wearing a red hat, with strong and viral accusations of "racism" - signalling to their allies that this person should be punished, and many of those allies are happy to comply in whatever way their position in society allows them to. These attitudes and behaviors are pervasive and malignant; the yard signs are only a visible symptom of a larger problem.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take it a step further, if that was the forecast 4 days in a row, you would expect it to rain one of those days.

Not necessarily. There is a 0.75 0.75 0.75*0.75 or a 31% chance of no rain at all

I'm not saying it's certain, but it's what I'd expect. It raining on one day out of 4 is the most common case.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#234
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, if you want my hot take, the conditional forecasting is to save their ass on election night from being embarrassingly wrong again. Well Nate Silver wrote a full critically acclaimed book about why these types of forecast are more useful (and accurate) in reality because they account for uncertainty - he has been doing this for years, ever since he used to write similar algorithms to help bookies pick odds f…

I think it’s certainly more grounded in reality if you realize 538 is basically finished if they miss the mark again. If you listen to what they say, they admit they were not able to measure for the no-colllege male demographic in 2016, or in other words, they couldn’t model identity politics. Why couldn’t they do that? I’m not sure, but they are certain they can this time around because they saw the 2016 data and no…

> I think it’s certainly more grounded in reality if you realize 538 is basically finished if they miss the mark again.

What does missing the mark mean though? In 2016 they proposed a c30% chance that Donald would win, and a 70% chance Hillary would win. Does that mean they were wrong? Not really, because that's how probabilistic forecasting works - and they stated their confidence interval - they were 70% confident that Hillary would win, but thought there was a 30% chance Donald would win.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Gelman claims the opposite.

No, what Gelman says is that he suspects that to compensate for the fat tails in 538's state distributions, they had to reduce the between-state correlations, to get a desired overall level of uncertainty. This implies that correlations increase, rather than decrease, the overall level of uncertainty. This is also easy to see from a basic probability perspective, using the concept of variance. For example, if you hav…

No, here's what Gelman says:

> the lower the correlation between states, the more uncertainty you need for each individual state forecast to get a desired national uncertainty

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#236
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you read the parent in the opposite direction than intended. It was praise for getting this done so quickly, by my read. Granted, i could just be misreading this post. :)

I read it as an encouragement for parent to not take the "hour" mentioned by TFA at face value, so they shouldn't be too hard on themselves.

Ah, a much better reading than mine!

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#237
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always liked Enrico Fermi's attitude on this. When you're Enrico Fermi, you get to say things like "One data point gives you a curve. Two data points gives you the distribution about the curve."

Curious is there a source for this? It is meant as satire?

The source is a long ago personal comment from my dad, who worked with and was personal friends with Fermi.

As to whether it's sarcasm, I'd describe it more as an inside joke with just a touch of the self-aware intellectual arrogance Physicists are famous for (see Lord Rutherford's "All science is either Physics or stamp collecting").

Trying to explain a joke is always dangerous so hopefully what follows won't be a mistake, but here goes:

The way I have always interpreted the first sentence is to hear Fermi saying that when you are doing an experiment, you should have a deep understanding of the family of curves or behaviors the system under test is expected to follow, including the full range of curves that would follow from interactions that are wildly different from what you might naively expect. If you really understand the Physics of the system (this is where it starts to blend the line from advice to a joke), the measurement of one single data point should be enough to tell you which of those possible curves describes the actual behavior of the system (the joke being both that it's funny to be that arrogant and that it's obvious to anyone you'd tell this joke to that mathematically you need at least two points to determine a line, so by saying one point gives you not just a line but a curve the speaker is purposely going over the top for fun). Moving into the second sentence ("two points gives you the distribution about the curve") takes the statement into full-on joke mode, with the comment shifting from an observation about knowing your Physics to an insider dig at the relationship between theoretical Physicists and experimental Physicists (Fermi being one of the greatest theoretical Physicists of all time). When he says that two points gives you a distribution about the curve, he's saying he as a theoretical Physicist understands the underlying Physics of the system better than the experimentalist understands the noise in their experimental hardware, or alternatively that the noise in the hardware is sufficiently uninteresting as to be irrelevant to him. The former view would simply be arrogance but leaving the second option open circles the joke back to include a bit of insider self deprecating humor in that he's purposely ignoring experimental error, a thing theoretical Physicists are famous for doing.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#238
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious is there a source for this? It is meant as satire?

The source is a long ago personal comment from my dad, who worked with and was personal friends with Fermi. As to whether it's sarcasm, I'd describe it more as an inside joke with just a touch of the self-aware intellectual arrogance Physicists are famous for (see Lord Rutherford's "All science is either Physics or stamp collecting"). Trying to explain a joke is always dangerous so hopefully what follows won't be a m…

Awesome that there's the connection with your dad, I got the joke but it's also funny that some experimentalists have taken this literally AKA hand sketching the gravitational wave signature and looking for matches as done with LIGO.

It's bizarre there was no better analytical/computational way to come to what they were expecting.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#239
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misreading or confused or something. The 538 piece points to a ~10% swing away from the (in the case of black voters) 82% that favored Hillary. This is very different from a swing all the way to a 10% preference for Trump. A bigger turnout by (these) minority voters, assuming they cast votes even vaguely in line with this polling, is more votes in Biden's column than Trump's. That's bad news for Trump.

I think you're misreading my statement, it's a 10% swing in the direction of Trump, not a 10% overall preference for Trump. From 82% favoring Hillary to 71% favoring Biden for black voters. That's a 10% change towards Trump's direction. If 16 million black voters participated in 2016 then that's around 13.1 million votes for Hillary and 2.9 million for Trump. If polling is correct this year and we see around similar…

Apologies, my above explanation is actually wrong. The article is actually referencing the margin of the candidate. So it was a 82 point margin between Clinton and Trump in 2016, which is still difficult to interpret because it doesn't mention if this includes 3rd party votes. But assuming 98% of voters voted Clinton or Trump, this would mean that 90% of black votes went to Clinton and 8% went to Trump in 2016.

This would then mean that if 98% vote Trump or Biden in 2020, we'll see something like 84% of the black vote for Biden and 13% of the black vote for Trump. A 5% overall change using 2016 voter participation numbers is still somewhere around 700,000 vote change in the black vote, which is certainly not insignificant. Adding in the change in the Hispanic vote (a margin change from 37 points in 2016 to 23 this year), this could certainly change swing state outcomes.

Re: Reverse-engineering the problematic tail behavior of Fivethirtyeight forecast

#240
post #239
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misreading my statement, it's a 10% swing in the direction of Trump, not a 10% overall preference for Trump. From 82% favoring Hillary to 71% favoring Biden for black voters. That's a 10% change towards Trump's direction. If 16 million black voters participated in 2016 then that's around 13.1 million votes for Hillary and 2.9 million for Trump. If polling is correct this year and we see around similar…

Apologies, my above explanation is actually wrong. The article is actually referencing the margin of the candidate. So it was a 82 point margin between Clinton and Trump in 2016, which is still difficult to interpret because it doesn't mention if this includes 3rd party votes. But assuming 98% of voters voted Clinton or Trump, this would mean that 90% of black votes went to Clinton and 8% went to Trump in 2016. This…

But unless I'm misunderstanding something, the change in approval is already factored into the current predictions. If there is a greater than expected turnout by a group of people voting - in aggregate - more for Biden than for Trump, then that favors Biden relative to the current predictions. So that's not going to be a reason for a surprise in the other direction.

There are plenty of reasons our predictions might not match reality, but they're not going to be wrong in that direction for that reason.

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