Oleg Zabluda's blog
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
 
Nate Silver (1978-present), an American statistician, in 2007 began to publish predictions related to the 2008 US...
Nate Silver (1978-present), an American statistician, in 2007 began to publish predictions related to the 2008 US presidential election on his own polling aggregation website, FiveThirtyEight.com, correctly predicting the winner of 49 of the 50 states (missed Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 1%). His projected national popular vote differential of 6.1% was below the actual figure of 7.2%. He correctly predicted the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races that year.

== Nov 2, 2010 midterm elections ==
In Senate elections, he correctly predicted 34 out of 37  states, missing Colorado (slightly), Alaska, and Nevada (Harry Reid won by 5.5%, while Nate predicted him to lose by 3.0%). Forecast was Republicans winning 7 seats vs actual 6 seats.

In U.S. House of Representatives elections he projected net gain of 53 (± 29–30, 95% confidence interval) seats by the Republicans. Actual result was 63 seats.

In gubernatorial races, he correctly predicted the winner of 36 out of 37, missing Illinois (election results 46.6% to 46.1%).

== Nov 6, 2012 elections ==
In Presidential elections, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with at least two academic-based analysts, by aggregated polls from multiple pollsters. In contrast, individual pollsters were less successful. For example, Rasmussen "missed on 6 of its 9 swing-state polls".

In Senate elections he correctly predicted 31 out of 33 states, missing 
ND and MT.

In 2010, Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog was licensed for publication by The New York Times

SIlver published book "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't" in Sep 2012.

Silver rejects 'frequentist' ideology, and preaches incremental Bayesianism. See https://plus.google.com/112065430692128821190/posts/Hr8JUM826bw

========= Prediction scorecards: ======
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/11/pundit_scorecard_checking_pundits_predictions_against_the_actual_results.html
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/11/your-pundit-prediction-scorecard/58729/
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/pundit-forecasts-all-wrong-silver-perfectly-right-is-punditry-dead/

====== Other reading material =======

Presidential Polls: Should You Trust Nate Silver 538, Intrade, or Rasmussen Polls?
http://www.policymic.com/articles/18183/presidential-polls-should-you-trust-nate-silver-538-intrade-or-rasmussen-polls

Manipulation in Political Prediction Markets (2010)
http://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=jbel

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/90371/intrade-and-jon-huntsman-president-odds-republican-nomination

===========================

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fivethirtyeight
http://FiveThirtyEight.com
http://FiveThirtyEight.com/methodology/
http://books.google.com/books?id=SI-VqAT4_hYC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

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