Society | DOI: 10.1145/2447976.2447984
‘Small Data’ enabled Prediction
of obama’s Win, Say economists
“Big data” from crowdsourcing resulted in more complex predictions.
Nine months beFore the 2012 U.S. presidential elec- tion last November, econo- mists knew the election’s outcome. They attribute
their forecasting success not to social
network-sourced “big data” as some
in the media have suggested, but to
“small data” they say could have just
as accurately been figured with a pencil and paper as with a computer.
The electoral process in the U.S.
is somewhat complex, which complicates the process of forecasting
its outcome. The president and vice
president are not elected directly by
the voters; instead, the Electoral College, an institution made up of “
electors” who are chosen by popular vote
on a state-by-state basis, elects the nation’s top executives every four years.
Each of the 50 U.S. states is entitled to
as many electors as it has members of
Congress (which includes two senators and a number of representatives
proportional to each state’s population), and those electors are supposed
to cast their votes for the winner of the
popular vote in each state.
With all that in mind, economists
say the 2012 presidential election was
just too early to have relied on input
from unproven data from sources like
Facebook, Twitter, and search results.
Instead, they used social media input
to make more complex combination
predictions—just as they anticipate
doing for the next presidential election
in 2016.
Photogra Ph by maxh Photo/ shutterstock.com
How data was used to predict the
election’s results depended entirely
on the forecasting methodology chosen, four basic types of which were
employed by economists in 2012, says
Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University
of Michigan.
He describes them this way:
˲ The fundamentals method. This
includes such factors as GDP growth,
unemployment rate, and whether the
candidate is an incumbent. “The mod-
el is a very simplistic, stripped-down
one,” says Wolfers, “and that is its vir-
tue. Because we only get one presiden-
tial election every four years, we have a
limited number of observations from
which to draw. A more complicated
model would require additional obser-
vations we just don’t have.”
