Related papers: Understanding the 2016 US Presidential Election us…
We study monotone ecological inference, a partial identification approach to ecological inference. The approach exploits information about one or both of the following conditional associations: (1) outcome differences between groups within…
Opinion mining and demographic attribute inference have many applications in social science. In this paper, we propose models to infer daily joint probabilities of multiple latent attributes from Twitter data, such as political sentiment…
Empirical analyses on the factors driving vote switching are rare, usually conducted at the national level without considering the parties of origin and destination, and often unreliable due to the severe inaccuracy of recall survey data.…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
In this paper, we propose a web-centered framework to infer voter preferences for the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries. Using Twitter data collected from Sept. 2015 to March 2016, we first uncover the tweeting tactics of the candidates and…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
In the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, many state level public opinion polls, particularly in the Upper Midwest, incorrectly predicted the winning candidate. One leading explanation for this polling miss is that the precipitous…
It is important to incorporate spatial geographic information into U.S. presidential election analysis, especially for swing states. The state-level analysis also faces significant challenges of limited spatial data availability. To address…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…
An increasingly common methodological issue in the field of social science is high-dimensional and highly correlated datasets that are unamenable to the traditional deductive framework of study. Analysis of candidate choice in the 2020…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
We present novel methods for predicting the outcome of large elections. Our first algorithm uses a diffusion process to model the time uncertainty inherent in polls taken with substantial calendar time left to the election. Our second model…
Twitter as a new form of social media potentially contains useful information that opens new opportunities for content analysis on tweets. This paper examines the predictive power of Twitter regarding the US presidential election of 2012.…
Classification is an important supervised machine learning method, which is necessary and challenging issue for ecological research. It offers a way to classify a dataset into subsets that share common patterns. Notably, there are many…
We propose a framework to measure, evaluate, and rank campaign effectiveness in the ongoing 2016 U.S. presidential election. Using Twitter data collected from Sept. 2015 to Jan. 2016, we first uncover the tweeting tactics of the candidates…
We assess empirical models in climate econometrics using modern statistical learning techniques. Existing approaches are prone to outliers, ignore sample dependencies, and lack principled model selection. To address these issues, we…
Polarization in American politics has been extensively documented and analyzed for decades, and the phenomenon became all the more apparent during the 2016 presidential election, where Trump and Clinton depicted two radically different…
In almost every election cycle, the validity of the United States Electoral College is brought into question. The 2016 Presidential Election again brought up the issue of a candidate winning the popular vote but not winning the Electoral…
With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…
We consider a problem of ecological inference, in which individual-level covariates are known, but labeled data is available only at the aggregate level. The intended application is modeling voter preferences in elections. In Rosenman and…