The United States is so polarized that it can seem that Republicans and Democrats choose to exist in two entirely different versions of the day, depending on their media diet. But a new analysis of the web traffic of 148 news organizations shows something subtler: Publications across the political spectrum […] Read more »
Big Data’s Big Misses: 2016 Was a Bad Year For Predictions
Goodbye 2016. The journalists and analysts who work with numbers will not miss you. From the United States to the United Kingdom, the last 12 months will be remembered for missed calls, surprises and upsets that didn’t just beat the odds, but that shattered them – and not just in […] Read more »
How Analytical Models Failed Clinton
… The reliance, or perhaps over-reliance on analytics, may be one of the factors contributing to Clinton’s surprise defeat. The Clinton team was so confident in its analytical models that it opted not to conduct tracking polls in a number of states during the last month of campaign. As a […] Read more »
Algorithmic Bias: How the Clinton Campaign May Have Lost the Presidency or Why You Should Care
We’ve recently been informed that the Clinton campaign relied heavily on an automated decision aid to inform senior campaign leaders about likely scenarios in the election. This algorithm—known as “Ada”—was a key component, if not “the” component in how senior staffers formulated campaigning strategy. … So what happened with Clinton’s […] Read more »
How to recover from the polling disaster of 2016? Look beyond polls.
Planes rarely crash because one instrument fails or one gauge gives a bad reading. Rather, the right combination of things fail in tandem — a mechanical problem paired with bad weather, a backup system malfunctioning at the same time as a pilot error — leading to catastrophe. The disaster of […] Read more »
Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America—and They Were Right
Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up in their San Antonio headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were predicting this outcome. But the scientists picked up disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others weren’t seeing. It […] Read more »