STAT 344 Chapter Notes - Chapter unit4b: Fivethirtyeight, Posterior Probability, Implementation Force
Document Summary
It"s all well and good having polls that assess the popularity of a political party, or the popularity of a speci c candidate in a geographic location. Poll aggregators (like fivethirtyeight. com) typically provide both estimates of proportions of voters favouring a candidate/party and forecasts of likely global election outcomes. We can shed some light on such forecasts. To make things simple, consider an oversimpli ed electoral system, where there are n. Members of parliament (one for each of n ridings), and only two political parties (call them a and b). We regard pi and 1 pi as the proportions of i-th riding voters who support a and b respectively. So party a will form a majority government if and only if the number of ridings in which pi > 0. 5 exceeds n/2. The goal is to use the available information to make a forecast.