Welcome all to 2014, where we will
enjoy the drama of three state elections (South Australia on March 15,
Tasmania before June 7 and Victoria on November 29), the US Mid-term elections
(November 4), a possible federal senate re-election in WA (before April 26), an
outside shot at a federal double disillusion in July/August and a
very long shot at a QLD state election to boot.
Last election turned out pretty poorly
for me as far as electoral predictions, and obviously we hope to do
better this year. Last year's federal predictions where partly thrown
by some really odd outcomes (I'm looking at you, conservative
Tasmania), and partly by poor methodology. The latter can be fixed;
the former will require some recalibration.
Some elections are less predictable
than others. To account for this we are going to start measuring
successful predictions differently. Taking the simple pendulum
calculations as a baseline, the test will be to see whether the
Infographinomicon's predictions fare better or worse than just
assuming an uniform swing based on polling.
Here we see the actual results,
predictions based on the pendulum/polling and my predictions side by
side.
Pendulum tossups occur in seats held by
Independents or non Labor-Coalition parties, since these lie outside
the scope of the swing calculations. My tossups are seats that I
determined to be too close to call. Informally I have never allowed
tossups to constitute more than 5% of my predictions. From now on
that will be a solid rule here; at least 95% of all seats must have a
prediction. Further, excessive tossups will count against me in this
measure of success. I have opted to include tossups in the following
calculations as a reward for contests where I have fewer tossups than
the pendulum, and a handicap where I have more.
The rating at the bottom is calculated
by dividing the number of correct predictions made here by the number
of correct predictions resulting from the basic pendulum method. The
target is to perform in excess of 100% -- that is, to provide more
accurate predictions than the pendulum. Unfortunately, in the federal
election this blog was only 97% as accurate as the pendulum, which is
slightly embarrassing. With 131 correct predictions the pendulum had
an 87% success rate, which is not great but better than the 85%
success rate of the Infographinomicon with 127 correct assessments.
Ignoring tossups, the pendulum would
offer a 90.3% success rate, which if passable, while the
Infographinomicon only had 88.8% right. This does boost the blog to
98% accuracy compared with the pendulum, but takes unfair advantage
of the two additional tossups. Without the 5% rule, it would be easy
to ignore all but the safest predictions and get 100% accuracy for a
rating of 111% as accurate as the pendulum.
Before we get into full-swing electoral
mode for the state election (or the WA senate re-vote if that comes
first) I'd like to spend some time reassessing the usefulness of our
predictive tools from last year and see how we can improve our
methodology.
