Oct 13 2008
Can Data Predict the Future?
Given that no one in Boston seemed to be working today due to the combination of Columbus Day and afternoon playoff baseball (ok, really just the baseball), this article in New York Magazine seemed all-too-appropriate.
Amazingly, it seems that many in the political sphere believe a baseball statistician — not a seasoned political pollster – might be the best candidate to successfully predict the outcome of the upcoming election.
The article doesn’t have too much to do with email directly, but it certainly reinforces the notion that there’s a treasure trove of value in your data, whether it’s used for predicting votes will be cast, who will win the World Series, or how many airplane tickets you will sell to a new market. Most interestingly, the article also gives marketers motivation to try new statistical methods for predicting customer behavior based on Nate Silver’s common-sense, out-of-the-box method:
Every other pundit, though, was doing what they’ve always done, i.e., following the polls. Silver decided to ignore the polls. Instead, he used this observation about demographics to create a model that took voting patterns from previous primaries and applied them to upcoming contests. No phone calls, no sample sizes, no guesswork. His crucial assumption, of course, was that each demographic group would vote in the same way, in the same percentages, as they had in other states in the past.
Like many of the so-called Moneyball breakthroughs in baseball, this was both a fairly intuitive conclusion and a radical break from conventional thinking…But his hunch about demographics proved correct: It’s how he called the Indiana and North Carolina results so accurately when the polls got them so wrong.
