538 quite explicitly lowers weight of frequent polls, so those three day running polls most certainly have less impact than another poll. DSeid quoted this already:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-were-tracking-donald-trumps-approval-ratings/
Post 105, as a whole, was not polite.
Whatever. Here’s the 3 week period at the start of the dip.
Rasmussen non-Rasmussen Combined
7/22/19 -1.636364 -10.086567 -8.894872
8/11/19 -6.4 -10.168142 -9.601504
Net net -4.763636 -0.081575 -0.706632
Correct. We discussed it earlier.
That doesn’t really change anything I posted.
You didn’t discuss it. You pretended it didn’t matter. You said basically “sure, he discounts them but not completely” and then continued on.
BTW Lance Turbo,
Do you believe that one poll (of seven that report each week, and others also impacting the output) “could have a noticeable effect with a large swing. Even a C+ polster.”
Or do you believe that 538 would deal with such “a poll that is a large outlier from all other polling … by adjusting the weight of such a poll downward algorithmically”?
Or are we back at quantum states in which you hold both those opposing belief states at the same time until you see what the measurement is?
Me?
I believe that 538 has explained how they deal with outliers well in a recent article. It goes into the pot, weighted by the houses rating and size factors. But there’s more …
Yeah again, the final week of the campaign is very special, recency matters more, and outliers are more to be taken seriously.
Back to how to handle sparse polling out of Iowa. If that Warren up by 11 had been a Selzer report, I’d have believed it was at least in the ballpark, that there had been a major shift in the Iowa race, and that future polling would be not horribly inconsistent with it.
Is there please anyway to have this line placed on the same graph for the whole 40 day cycle? If it is not too much work for someone who understands how.
Thank you very much in advance!
Correct.
I can see how much they are discounted, and also artifacts of the special handling that daily trackers receive in the ‘weight’ column on the page. This information is already baked in to my position. If you remind me of it a third time it still won’t change anything.
I do believe both these things, but these things are not inherently contradictory. These things are both obviously true.
While I would still love to see the whole 40 day cycle with the Rasmussen inclusive aggregate added, I recognize that running the script may be too big of an ask.
That’s okay. We can illustrate with this 3 week selected steepest part of Rasmussen’s curve, without seeing it graphically.
Your supplied numbers:
Adding Rasmussen (and keeping it weighted as high as any contemporaneously reporting A+ house, the absurd case), which had dropped 4.76 points over that time, altered this version of an aggregate’s results by 0.62 points from its non-Rasmussen baseline. Using this method it would take a move of Rasmussen by 10 to move the aggregate by 1.3 points. 538 moved 1.6 during that time.
Over the 40 day period Rasmussen appeared to move less than 4 points. Again, not discounting their weight and length of impact to any less than the highest rated houses, to the fractional weight it actually is, if all else was static, Rasmussen would have moved your version of an aggregate by about half a point.
So the result of accepting your version of an aggregate as “everything else” is that Rasmussen’s impact on the total is some significant amount less than half a point (how much less depending on how much less of a weight a C+ house gets relative to A+ to B+ ones).
Per your numbers.
I’d call somewhere significantly less than half a point difference in a curve over 40 days “virtually (but not exactly) the same” curves.
That sub half fraction of a point did, in that specific time period, play a part in 538’s output, but the 538 tracker would have dropped its not very significant about 3 points with or without it included, and those who felt that about 3 points of a change was maybe significant would have still been asking if it was and if so what caused it.
Jesus fuck.
I was going tp let this thread die, but now I’m done being nice.
A while back you posted this from 538…
And I mused, “I’m not sure how you are reading this and still coming to the conclusion that month old data could still be weighted as heavily as fresh data.” I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you understood what you posted.
Then you posted…
And I realized that I should not have given you the benefit of the doubt.
You didn’t see that excerpt from 538 that you posted contradicted your position because you didn’t understand it. You didn’t understand it because you haven’t done the work. And you didn’t do the work because you aren’t capable.
On the 538 page where they go into the approval model details they link to the Wikipedia page for local regression. Do you know how local regression works? Of course you don’t. Have you read Cleveland’s paper describing the method? No fucking way.
Here’s an important quote from the Wikipedia page…
Or one from Cleveland…
This means that when we are trying to estimate the response near d over the interval with bandwidth b from start date d - b to end date d points near d - b have almost no weight. The weighting of the polls by quality ameliorates this to a tiny degree, but nowhere near enough to make a d - b have more weight than a d poll. At best this might make two points near each other swap places when ranked by the weight function, but there is no way even a poll with ten times the weight of another could overcome the effect of distance imposed by the tri-cube (or sufficiently similar) weight function they are using.
Even if that were not the case, and it definitely is, a poll nearly a month old is only in one of the three local regressions that they combine to determine the response at d, and the local regression that the month old poll is part of contains the most polls so dilutes each poll in it the most.
For these two reasons, a month old poll has less (probably much less) than 1% of the weight of even the freshest poll according to the cite you provided but didn’t understand. Even in the 10 day bandwidth a 10 day old poll probably can’t be higher than 3% of a fresh poll.
You have posted numerous things like:
“The current approval rating is not the circumstance that overweights recency over house reliability. Quite the opposite circumstance.”
“Yeah again, the final week of the campaign is very special, recency matters more, and outliers are more to be taken seriously.”
“Do you really not understand why election eve is “special”?”
“The limit would be that 538 actually weights the C+ one exactly as much as the B ones, right?”
That is equivalent to you waving a giant ignorance flag declaring to the world that you don’t understand your own cites.
Please stop posting as if you understand the 538 model better than everyone else. You do not.
Please stop condescending to me and then asking me to do your work. Do your own work and maybe shit like this won’t happen again.
Does any of that rambling incoherent wall of text have anything to do with the post above it or the documentation that even large swings of a Rasmussen weighted as high as anything else would, if everything else is static, have relatively little impact on your own Rasmussen inclusive aggregation?
No.
And given that you won’t engage in good faith after multiple attempts … have a nice day.
And apparently, your definition of “being nice” is shutting up and going away (so to punish people you… talk to them? Does that work in real life, too?).
I for one am interested in Trump’s approval. And where it’s going. So I keep checking this thread in hopes that the arguing over one poll is over. Anyone want to get back to the “Reason why Trump’s approval ratings are falling?”
Easy. Ask for the strength of the respondent’s feelings on a 1 to 5 scale.
Why has there been so much discussion in this thread about the accuracy and significance of various polls and analyses of their applications? Let us simply assume arguendo that Trump’s approval rates are falling. The important question, raised by the OP, and what we ought to be debating here, is why? What has he done recently that would make inroads in his hitherto-reliable base?
If we accept that the 3 point drop means anything then we must note that it was drop from the top of his long term narrow range back to its middle section and really the question is why was he near the top of that narrow range at the start, not why he went back to baseline.
So far nothing has made inroads with that reliable base.
As the OP, I was a little surprised that this thread turned into Statistics 203: The Intricacies and Controversies of Political Polling and You. I didn’t really read through all that because it seemed to be getting nowhere fast.
It still could just be noise, but according to 538 he is down a half of percent since the thread start date.
Hermitian, I appreciate you starting the thread. Such threads are worthy and capable of bringing light into the darkness.
But this one seems poisoned. Feel free to start another one. Lance? DSeid? Take your feud elsewhere.