Tips on how to construct a polls-only goal Bayesian mannequin that goes from a state polling result in likelihood of successful the state
With the presidential election approaching, a query I, and I count on many others have, is does a candidate’s polling in a state interprets to their likelihood of successful the state.
On this weblog submit, I wish to discover the query utilizing goal Bayesian inference ([3]) and election outcomes from 2016 and 2020. The purpose will probably be to construct a easy polls-only mannequin that takes a candidate’s state polling lead and produces a posterior distribution for the likelihood of the candidate successful the state
the place the posterior distribution measures our perception in how predictive polls are.
For the mannequin, I’ll use logistic regression with a single unknown weight variable, w:
Taking the 2020 and 2016 elections as observations and utilizing an appropriate prior, π, we will then produce a posterior distribution for the unknown weight
the place