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> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusio
by foobarqux 14y ago
> [Silver's evaluation] involves judgment, too, but because it’s based in a scientific process, we can trace how he applied that judgment to reach his conclusions.
No, as far as I know the actual model and its parameters are not public. I understand why this is the case but without that information the basis for the conclusions are effectively as obscure as those produced by the conventional journalists decried in the article.
- _delirium 14y agoWeird, in '08 he had a page giving the model in detail, including some of the fit values (e.g. the imputed pollster "house effects"), but I can't find it this time around. Change since the NYT purchase?
- Anechoic 14y agoHouse effects for 2012: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculating-house-effects-of-polling-firms/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/calculat...
- dbecker 14y agoSilver tries to be transparent about his model. For a non- technical description, see [1]. He used to have something more technical/concrete on his personal blog. I'm guessing you can still find that easily. The fact that he doesn't include specific equations in his NYTimes blog is likely only to improve accessibility to non-technical readers. That said, he has given enough detail for others to roughly replicate his work. See [2] [1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/ [2] https://github.com/jseabold/538model https://github.com/jseabold/538model
- foobarqux 14y agoYou substantially underestimate the effect of the (unreported) model parameters. A person can often arbitrarily change the prediction by tweaking the parameters. Thank you for the link to the attempt to reproduce Silver's results. I will have to spend more time to determine how closely they agree -- it isn't obvious after a cursory look.
- dbecker 14y agoThat's a good point about the importance of parameters. I wonder whether Silver would be responsive if you emailed him asking about parameters.