FiveThirtyEight has a GitHub repo with story-related data and scripts

Post by SyneRyder » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 4:28 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #22

smcl wrote: post #11

No story about Nate Silver and 538 is complete without mentioning his new rival in the prediction space - Carl Diggler - who has been kicking his butt on the presidential primaries, calling tough elections correctly where Nate has refused to give more than a "Maybe Sanders, Maybe Clinton..." prediction. Carl is a work of fiction, invented by a couple of journalists/friends as a parody of pundits: https://www.washingt…

> We called 19 out of the past 19 contests. FiveThirtyEight, whose model cannot work without polling, accurately predicted 13. FiveThirtyEight's model could work without polling (it's not the only predictor they use), but they don't publish results until there are at least two polls conducted. I would call that a feature, not a bug. Also, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the outcome of every primary race that it m…

Post by huac » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

neaden wrote: post #32

huac wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that even with 'rigorous methodology' and 'evidence' 538 doesn't do as well as Diggler. Predicting elections is, for the most part, an easy task. Polls are usually good enough to get some picture of the election at hand. One major shortcoming of a primarily evidence-based approach is how to call races without much polling (small sample size). Silver has consistently refused to cover these races at all. B…

The part you are ignoring is that there are many potential "Digglers" out there. If Diggler hadn't done well, you wouldn't have heard about it. Buy maybe you would have heard about some other guy who predicted the races correctly based on what kind of treat his horse wanted to eat that day.

Post by freehunter » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

ssharp wrote: post #21

InclinedPlane wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

538 is the classic "fighting the last war" problem. In 2012 the issue was that polling was unreliable, it was difficult to figure out what was actually going on with the electorate. FiveThirtyEight figured out how to crack that problem, by applying number crunching. This cycle, the problem is that the electorate hasn't actually decided what it wants yet, and there statistical methods aren't helpful at all. There bein…

Was 538 that good at predicting outcomes of the 2012 primaries? I know it's well established that they did a good job on the 2008 and 2012 general elections. Primaries have to be harder because there is far less polling information compared to the general election. Yes, they were unable to predict the Trump victory, but if the get 90-100% of states correct in the general election, then I doubt that much has changed w…

Post by smcl » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 10:48 PM UTC

neaden wrote: post #32

huac wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that even with 'rigorous methodology' and 'evidence' 538 doesn't do as well as Diggler. Predicting elections is, for the most part, an easy task. Polls are usually good enough to get some picture of the election at hand. One major shortcoming of a primarily evidence-based approach is how to call races without much polling (small sample size). Silver has consistently refused to cover these races at all. B…

The part you are ignoring is that there are many potential "Digglers" out there. If Diggler hadn't done well, you wouldn't have heard about it. Buy maybe you would have heard about some other guy who predicted the races correctly based on what kind of treat his horse wanted to eat that day.