Nate Silver’s Lessons for Big Data from the Unpredicted Trump Victory

http://thenewstack.io/lessons-big-data-unpredictability-trump-win/

by DataDiva • 10 years ago

10 11 10 years ago

thenewstack.io

NumberSix2• 10 years ago

The USC Dornsife/LA Times Daybreak Election Poll

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-usc-latimes-poll-2...

did a significantly better job than Nate Silver and 538 in estimating the level of Donald Trump support.

ZeroGravitas4• 10 years ago

No it didn't, it overestimated the popular vote too much in his direction and was off by about 5 points. Most polls were better than that.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/315145-one-la...

Since the 538 stuff is mostly a summary of all of those other, better polls, they got the popular vote pretty much bang on. Their modal of how that translated to the electoral college was better than any other model too.

Except for the "Donald Trump will win the popular vote, therefore he'll definitely win the electoral college, oops he didn't win the popular vote, but let's just pretend we're polling the electoral college instead" model.

NumberSix2• 10 years ago

USC Dornsife picked the winner. Other polls did not.

Trump got 46.1 percent of the popular vote:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...

That is almost the same as the 46.8 percent of the popular vote for Trump that USC Dornsife predicted. Pretty close to spot on.

The other polls, including 538, underestimated the size of Trump's support.

DefaultUserHN• 10 years ago

The biggest problem with Nate Silver was that he was a victim of fake news. He got caught up in the fake news, believing that Trump have no chance.

Anybody who actually went to a Trump rally would see with their own eyes, that what Trump said was totally different from what the TVs claimed he said. They could see that the whole media was lying about Trump.

If Nate Silver had went to just one Trump rally, he would have seen that too, and he would have known that Trump was going to win. Would have been able to tweak his data set, and would have made a better prediction.

Nate Silver’s Lessons for Big Data from the Unpredicted Trump Victory

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