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934 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-30-Nooooooooooooooooooo!


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Introduction: Michael Axelrod writes: Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman claims to have discovered 13 predictors that determine who will win the popular vote in presidential elections. He predicts Obama will win in 2012. Writing in his New York Times column, “538,” Nate Silver attempted a critique Lichtman’s prediction. Soon afterward Lichtman wrote a rejoinder. Evidently Lichtman has correctly and publicly predicted the popular vote winners in the last 7 presidential elections. I think he predicted Gore would win in 2000. He got the popular vote winner right, but not electoral college vote winner. Lichtman presents his methods in his early 1980s book, “The Keys to the White House.” Lichtman consulted with Volodia Keilis-Borok, and used a kernel discriminant analysis approach on election results from 1860-1980 as the training set. I think there is some argument as to scoring because Lichtman claims more than 7 successes. I guess he divided the data into a training and validation sets and w


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 Michael Axelrod writes: Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman claims to have discovered 13 predictors that determine who will win the popular vote in presidential elections. [sent-1, score-0.888]

2 Writing in his New York Times column, “538,” Nate Silver attempted a critique Lichtman’s prediction. [sent-3, score-0.117]

3 Evidently Lichtman has correctly and publicly predicted the popular vote winners in the last 7 presidential elections. [sent-5, score-0.797]

4 He got the popular vote winner right, but not electoral college vote winner. [sent-7, score-0.697]

5 Lichtman presents his methods in his early 1980s book, “The Keys to the White House. [sent-8, score-0.049]

6 ” Lichtman consulted with Volodia Keilis-Borok, and used a kernel discriminant analysis approach on election results from 1860-1980 as the training set. [sent-9, score-0.312]

7 I think there is some argument as to scoring because Lichtman claims more than 7 successes. [sent-10, score-0.133]

8 I guess he divided the data into a training and validation sets and wants credit for the validation. [sent-11, score-0.294]

9 Did he do what Edward Leamer calls a “specification search” with all the pitfalls? [sent-12, score-0.05]

10 I don’t think it’s very good based on your 1993 paper on why presidential polls are so variable when the vote is so predictable from political science variables. [sent-16, score-0.513]

11 If we can generally predict the popular vote to within a few percent a year ahead of the election, we don’t need those 13 variables he teased out of the data. [sent-17, score-0.442]

12 Nevertheless I think the proper method of how we score predictions is of interest. [sent-18, score-0.051]

13 It’s pretty easy to predict rain or no rain in the desert. [sent-19, score-0.492]

14 What we would like to know is how much better Lichtman does than a naive oracle where the oracle can be pretty good. [sent-21, score-0.387]

15 Incumbents win 70% of the time in presidential elections (since 1860). [sent-22, score-0.356]

16 In other words, how much does that 7 out of 7, or say n out of m where n is very close to m, tell us about the added information? [sent-23, score-0.063]

17 What does it tell us about the probability that the next prediction will be correct? [sent-24, score-0.063]


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Introduction: Michael Axelrod writes: Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman claims to have discovered 13 predictors that determine who will win the popular vote in presidential elections. He predicts Obama will win in 2012. Writing in his New York Times column, “538,” Nate Silver attempted a critique Lichtman’s prediction. Soon afterward Lichtman wrote a rejoinder. Evidently Lichtman has correctly and publicly predicted the popular vote winners in the last 7 presidential elections. I think he predicted Gore would win in 2000. He got the popular vote winner right, but not electoral college vote winner. Lichtman presents his methods in his early 1980s book, “The Keys to the White House.” Lichtman consulted with Volodia Keilis-Borok, and used a kernel discriminant analysis approach on election results from 1860-1980 as the training set. I think there is some argument as to scoring because Lichtman claims more than 7 successes. I guess he divided the data into a training and validation sets and w

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Introduction: Michael Axelrod writes: Quantitative historian Allan Lichtman claims to have discovered 13 predictors that determine who will win the popular vote in presidential elections. He predicts Obama will win in 2012. Writing in his New York Times column, “538,” Nate Silver attempted a critique Lichtman’s prediction. Soon afterward Lichtman wrote a rejoinder. Evidently Lichtman has correctly and publicly predicted the popular vote winners in the last 7 presidential elections. I think he predicted Gore would win in 2000. He got the popular vote winner right, but not electoral college vote winner. Lichtman presents his methods in his early 1980s book, “The Keys to the White House.” Lichtman consulted with Volodia Keilis-Borok, and used a kernel discriminant analysis approach on election results from 1860-1980 as the training set. I think there is some argument as to scoring because Lichtman claims more than 7 successes. I guess he divided the data into a training and validation sets and w

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