538 election forecasts made simple

Rafael Irizarry
2014-11-04

Nate Silver does a great job of explaining his forecast model to laypeople. However, as a statistician I’ve always wanted to know more details. After preparing a “predict the midterm elections“ homework for my data science class I have a better idea of what is going on.

Here is my best attempt at explaining the ideas of 538 using formulas and data. And here is the R markdown.