Thursday, September 18, 2008

Forecasting the Election Mathematically

This story comes from Daily India.com, of all places:

Operations researcher Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, along with a group of students and collaborators at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, created http://election08.cs.uiuc.edu/, a math model that dynamically forecasts the outcome of the election.

Over 4,000 analysts and experts in analytics are expected to attend next month's meetings. Jacobson's model applies a mathematical model to state polling data, using a dynamic programming algorithm to forecast electoral results.

I took a math modeling class once. Very interesting, but also kinda like sausage being made.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you want to see the beginning and the end but nothing in between?

Darren said...

That would actually make "election season", this one of which has been going on for nigh 2 years now, almost bearable.

Anonymous said...

sausage being made?