You watching fivethirtyeight.com?

[backscatter712]

Win percentage:

Obama 94.1%, McCain 5.9%

SCHWEEEEEEET!

[Seen the light]

1. Not enough concern in this thread imo.

[nini]

2. I saw that about 10 minutes ago...

:bounce:

[Mojambo]

3. Nate Silver is great.

Been following his work for a while.

He was great on Colbert.

[Teaser]

4. From a statistical standpoing, what does 94% mean?

I've thought about this a bit. Is it a measure of confidence in our result?

It clearly isn't a measure of and expected frequency of outcomes, since there is exactly one outcome to test it against.

[Godhumor]

7. 94% of his trial runs have Obama winning

Statistically they use a model then, I am assuming (I work with statistics) they run a random number game built with what the model says is happening in each state (i.e. 54% Obama wins Ohio). They run this for a massive number of sequences and then compute the win percentage from those results. Actually, go to 538 and look on the right side--he has his simulations graph right there.

[backscatter712]

8. Yep, it's your basic Monte Carlo simulation.

fivethirtyeight.com runs 10,000 simulated elections, using a random number generator to generate results and then crunch the statistical probablility numbers.

In the latest Monte Carlo run, Obama won 94.1% of the time, McCain won 5.9% of the time.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

[Teaser]

9. My question is a little deeper, I think

it's how to interpret the fact that the model has us "winning" that percentage of time.

I interpret as a measure of "confidence" in a win scenario.

[shanti]

5. yes

a friend told me about this site just tonight. isn't it a great site?

[Stagecoach]

6. I like the state-by-state breakdown

Really puts it in perspective of how things are stacking up, and also how the polls have fluctuated throughtout the weeks.