To check my understanding of the scoring, I compared Calavera’s score to mine in three cases.
Case a) Calavera’s predictions are all correct
Case b) Calavera’s except Collins wins in Maine
Case c) Calavera’s except Collins wins and Tillis is defeated
If several people enter the contest, presumably some will take the opportunity to play for perfect scores in cases b and/or c. I’m not sure that splitting the prize money among all those tied for best score is the right approach here.
How did prediction markets do for Clinton vs. Trump? I know most “experts” predicted Clinton to win easily. Including many UK bookies. Nate Silver was a rare case where he gave Trump about 1/3 chance of winning.
I’ll bet you $100 to charity of your choice if Tillis loses.
I think your numbers become almost[sup]*[/sup] identical to mine if you multiply by (-13) but you’ve come to the right message-board to practice pedantry!
[sup]*[/sup] - Only almost identical because my numbers are exact; yours are rounded.
If you’d like to discuss the effectiveness of betting markets at predicting political outcomes, start a thread. I think you’ll be surprised at what you learn.
If you’d like to participate in the competition in this thread, submit an entry.
Hey, maybe you guys that want to argue about how good or how useful polls are- can start another thread, and leave us to discuss the Op and senate predictions? Please? We know polls arent always accurate. Thankyouverymuch.
IIRC they did MUCH better than most pundits. Pundits — and Dopers — thought Hillary was a shoo-in. Prediction markets, however, were giving Trump a big chance (though not more than 50% IIRC).
There’s about a week left and there are only three entries thus far, although a couple of other posters dropped in to concede defeat by stating that they could not possibly enter such a contest until October.
Here’s where we stand now including some minor updates to my entry. Others are free to update their entries as well.
If we get a surge of new entries before month’s end, I will probably move to an all-integer submission, like Calavera. I’ll want whichever such submission seems most likely among the all-integer cases which have not been submitted by anyone else.
@ Lance — I’m not sure what your approach is here, but even supposing prediction perfection — that your submission minimizes expected total squared error — that is NOT the solution contestants should seek, given the Winner-Take-All scoring.
There’s nothing to take (per board rules) so there’s no reason to treat this contest as winner take all.
Integer solutions aren’t really in the spirit of the contest, but I’m not going to disallow them. However, we don’t really learn anything from integer solutions. Sure guessing each race correctly would result in a Brier score of zero, but is that a reproducible method? Is picking the integer solution that you find most likely and hasn’t been picked by anyone else something that something that can be applied to future elections if it wins this contest?
My goal for this thread (and future threads like it) is to determine which probabilistic forecasts produced by the SDMB were most accurate 5 months out, 4 months out, etc. But it’s beginning to look like my PredictIt derived forecast will win that distinction by being the only probabilistic forecast produced.
There’s nothing wrong with a contest to see who can pick the most winners, but that wasn’t the intent of this thread.
If everyone but me picks distinct integer solutions, I’ll probably finish either first or second. That’s a perfectly fine result for my method as far as I’m concerned. If it’s only competition is guessing everything correctly, I’ll be happy.
