Nate Silver is quite the buzz right now. For anyone not familiar he is a statistician (yes probabilities matter, not just possibilities 
) who blogs over at the NYTimes (the fivethirty blog) and just predicted all 50 state outcomes for the election correctly included calling that Florida would essentially be a tie that would eventually go to Obama. He also correctly predicted 31 of 33 Senate races.
Previously, he predicted all Senate races in 2008 as well as 49 of 50 Presidential state outcomes that year (getting Indiana wrong). Before the politics he founded and sold a baseball sabermetrics (using statistics and math to predict outcomes in baseball) company.
The guy is on fire and is getting a lot of well deserved attention. To predict the outcomes he used a lot of different polling data, applying weights, and using computer simulations. The predictions came with weights on how likely each outcome would be also (because again, probabilities matter)- Obama had a 91% chance of winning according to Silver's forecasting.
Quite impressive. Any thoughts?
) who blogs over at the NYTimes (the fivethirty blog) and just predicted all 50 state outcomes for the election correctly included calling that Florida would essentially be a tie that would eventually go to Obama. He also correctly predicted 31 of 33 Senate races.Previously, he predicted all Senate races in 2008 as well as 49 of 50 Presidential state outcomes that year (getting Indiana wrong). Before the politics he founded and sold a baseball sabermetrics (using statistics and math to predict outcomes in baseball) company.
The guy is on fire and is getting a lot of well deserved attention. To predict the outcomes he used a lot of different polling data, applying weights, and using computer simulations. The predictions came with weights on how likely each outcome would be also (because again, probabilities matter)- Obama had a 91% chance of winning according to Silver's forecasting.
Quite impressive. Any thoughts?
