Rising Stars Colloquium: Dr. Alexandria Volkening
Topic
Forecasting the 2020 U.S. elections: a compartmental modelling approach
Speakers
Details
Election dynamics are a rich complex system, and forecasting next month's U.S. elections is an exciting, high-stakes problem with many sources of subjectivity and uncertainty. In this talk, we take a dynamical-systems perspective on election forecasting, with the goal of helping to shed light on the forecast process and raise questions for future work. By adapting a well-studied model from epidemiology, we show how to combine a compartmental approach with polling data to produce forecasts of presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections at the state level. Our results for the last 16 years of U.S. elections are largely in agreement with those of popular analysts, and we apply our model to forecast the upcoming U.S. elections on 3 November 2020. We also use our modeling framework to explore how different methods for handling polling data and accounting for uncertainty affect forecasts.
Additional Information
This is an online event, click here for the Zoom meeting details
Dr. Alexandria Volkening, Northwestern U
Dr. Alexandria Volkening, Northwestern U