The Poll Aggregators of the Future Are Reproducible and Open Source | Hacker News Reader

The Poll Aggregators of the Future Are Reproducible and Open Source

slate.com

57 pointsespeed11 comments

I had some trouble finding the code[1] and the paper[2]. The Stan code itself is [3]

I think this is quite a strong model - if I was looking to work on it I'd like to see it incorporate some economic data (and probably previous election poll trends) as a way of attempting to improve the early-election-cycle forecasts.

[1] https://github.com/pkremp/polls

[2] http://votamatic.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Linzer-JASA1...

[3] https://github.com/pkremp/polls/blob/master/state%20and%20na...

Totally misleading title. "Polls" is one thing, poll aggregators are a whole other thing.

I was really excited to read about actual polls that are somehow open source (not sure how that would work though).

Open source would not be nearly as impressive as reproducible.

Yes, although is reproducibility even possible in polls? People's opinions change on a whim. In fact people's opinions can change simply because they were asked a question so the answer might be different if asked the question again,

I guess you could conduct the same poll with multiple sets of people and see how the results compare, but in a way that's what poll aggregators do.

Isn't the reasonable definition of reproducible for a poll having overlapping margins of error? A useful poll should do that.

The result is qualified, comparisons of results shouldn't ignore that.

The hardest part of an open source poll would be anonymization. Demographic information in some areas could be enough to come pretty close to uniquely identifying an individual.

The rest of it: Likely Voter Models, Demographic Weighting, etc would be pretty easy to have open source and reproducible once you've solved the issues.

Yes anonymization is the problem I was thinking of.

OK, we've added "Aggregators" to the story title to clarify.

>There’s lots of concern about media bias from all directions, and open source is the best way to address skepticism about particular assessments.

This is a really good and important point, I think. Let's argue about method, not outcome.

If that's true, then the polling companies of the future have new customers.

ptrs: Ben Adida worked on a cryptography-based open-audit voting system called HELIOS in 2008 -- could be used as part of anonymous yet auditable open-source polling / voting system:

http://ben.adida.net/research/

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