{"id":1769,"date":"2008-07-03T10:28:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-03T15:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/07\/03\/prediction-contest-update\/"},"modified":"2008-07-03T10:28:29","modified_gmt":"2008-07-03T15:28:29","slug":"prediction-contest-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/03\/prediction-contest-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Prediction Contest Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

The task was to predict how the popular vote<\/a> in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be.<\/p>\n

Entries are now complete, and here they are, in handy graphical format:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pretty, isn’t it? But a tad cluttered. Zooming in a bit:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And, in case you are one of those jumbled in the middle there, zooming in a bit more:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The mean (unweighted — sorry) prediction was that Obama would win 53.6 percent of the McCain\/Obama popular vote, while the median was 53.2. The average standard deviation was 1.2%. Clearly, for predictions anywhere near the popular values, a fairly small standard deviation was required for one’s curve to poke up past the crowd; indeed, some predictions with large errors are already mathematically eliminated. Like — me. That’s what you get for going first. Here is an even closer zoom, vertically as well as horizontally, centered on my 55.5 +- 1.5 prediction:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

See that aqua-colored bell curve, reaching a peak of about .27 at 55.5? That’s me, swamped by narrower neighbors. Confidence pays! I think there are about 20 entries out of 61 that have a nontrivial chance of winning.<\/p>\n

(If we were serious and respectable, we would have kept the predictions [and, crucially, the total number of entries] secret until they were all announced. We are neither serious nor respectable.)<\/p>\n

See you in November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}