Making Sense of Polls - Part 1

I'm a huge fan of fivethirtyeight (really I read almost every article written), and I think they do a great job of interpreting poll results. However, I do notice that the process in which they compile the results is tedious. Some of the tediousness, like collecting poll results, is inevitable. However, other work including figuring out which polls are reliable and how to interpret polls across different states seems like it might be automatable. I took a stab at this automation using data that fivethirtyeight compiled, which has compiled polling data for various state and national elections three weeks before the election date. This data was about 6200 polls, which is a relatively small sample to train a machine learning model on.

I've identified some key points that need to be figured out for any election forecast:
1) How to combine poll results (assuming all polls are good). This will be some form of a moving average, but exactly what kind of moving average taken is up for debate.
2) How to decide which polls are good. Bad polls are a problem. If a pollster is partisan, there needs to be a way to take into account.
3) Estimating the uncertainty in the combined polls. The sampling error is relatively small for most polls, but if pollsters choose not to publish a poll if it disagrees with the common wisdom, this can introduce bias. There is also uncertainty about how uncertain voters and third-party voters will swing.
4) How to determine correlations in the polls. That is, if a candidate performs worse than the polling average would suggest in Pennsylvania, there is likely to be a similar pattern in Wisconsin.

The last issue was tricky, and will not be covered here, but the first three issues are discussed in this post.

I tackle the problem as a time series prediction problem. That is, given a time series (when the polls happen and their results) I want to predict the outcome of the election. This time series can be interpreted as a sequence of events, which means recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are well-suited to solve the problem. RNNs even handle different-length sequences quite naturally, which is a plus as this is awkward to encode into useful input for other types of models like a tree-based model.

I use the data prior to 2014 as a training set and 2014 as a validation set. Once I've tuned all the parameters on 2014, I retrain the model with both the training and validation set and predict for 2016 presidential races.

In this post, I tackle the problem of predicting individual races, instead of whole elections (or the whole presidential race, which is equally complex). For each poll, I compile a set of information about the polls:
• How each candidate in the race polled, in order of democrat, republican, and highest polling third party candidate, if available. The order is relevant as I account for the political preferences of polls.
• The number of days before the election that the poll was conducted¹.
• The sample size of the poll².
• The partisan leaning of the polling agency, if known
• Whether a live caller was used to conduct the poll (default to false if unknown).
• Whether the poll is an Internet poll (default to false if unknown).
• Whether the pollster is a member of the NCPP, AAPOR, or Roper organizations.
• Of polls conducted before the poll, the percentile of the number of polls the pollster has conducted relative to all other pollsters. The intuition here is that agencies that do one poll are not very reliable, whereas agencies that have done many polls probably are.

All of this information is collected into a single vector, which I will call the poll information. I then take all polls of the same race previous to that poll and make an ordered list of the poll informations, which is the sequence that is the input to the neural network model.

With this as input, I have the neural network predict the ultimate margin of the election. I do not include any sense of "year" as input to the neural network as I wish the model to extrapolate on this variable and hence I do not want the model to overfit to any trends there may be in this variable. I use three LSTM layers with 256 units followed by two fully connected layers with 512 neurons. The output layer is one neuron that predicts the final margin of the election. Mean squared error is used as the loss function. I initialize all weights randomly (using the keras defaults), but there might be a benefit to initialize by transfer learning from an exponentially weighted moving average.

I use dropout at time of prediction as a way to get an estimate of the error in the output of the model. The range where 90% of predictions lie using different RNG seeds for the dropout gives a confidence interval³. To calibrate the amount of dropout to apply after each layer, I trained the model on a training set (polls for elections before 2014) and tested different levels of dropout on the validation set (the 2014 election). I find the percentile of the true election result within the Monte Carlo model predictions. Thus, a perfectly calibrated model would have a uniform distribution of the percentile of true election results within the Monte Carlo model predictions. Of course, I do not expect the model to ever be perfectly calibrated, so I chose the dropout rate that minimized the KS-test statistic with the uniform distribution. This turned out to be 40%, which was comforting as this is a typical choice for dropout at training.

A comparison of the calibration (blue) and ideal (green) CDFs for predictions on the test set. For the calibration curve, the optimal dropout of 40% is used.

I then retrain the model using all data prior to 2016 (thus using both the training and validation set). I take the calibrated dropout rate and again get Monte Carlo samples for polls, using the newly trained model, on the test set. I then simply count the number of positive margin Monte Carlo outputs to get a probability that the election swings in favor of the first party.

Applying this to a race, I find that the uncertainty in ultimate election margin pretty large, around 15%. This isn't any larger than predictions with other aggregation methods, but this shows that it really is tough to accurately call close races just based on polls.

Margin predicted (90% CI) by the model for the 2016 presidential election in Pennsylvania. The red line shows the actual margin.

Though this model hasn't learned the relationships between states, I tried applying it to the 2016 presidential election. To get the probability of a candidate winning based on the polls available that day, for each state I run 1000 predictions with different RNG seeds. For each of these 1000 predictions, I add up the electoral votes the candidate would win if they had the predicted margins. The probability of the candidate winning is then the percentage of these outcomes that is below 270.

Histograms of possible presidential election outcomes predicted by the model each day before the election. The outcomes to the left of the red line are cases that result in a Republic victory (the ultimate outcome).

Ultimately, the model showed there was a 93% chance of Clinton winning the election on election day. This is already a more conservative estimate than what some news sources predicted.

The probability of Clinton winning the 2016 election predicted by the model as a function of days before the election.

Unless the 2016 election truly was a rare event, this shows that clearly, the model is incomplete. Relationships between how states vote compared to polling are crucial to capture. It would also be useful to include more polls in the training set to learn how to aggregate polls more effectively, and in particular, better discern which pollsters are reliable. More features, such as whether the incumbent president is running or if it is an off-year election may also add more information in the predictions. I'll explore some of these ideas in a future blog post.

Code for this blog post is available here.

1. Divide by 365 days to normalize.
2. This is measured in thousands. I normalized using a tanh to get a number between 0 and 1. When not available, this defaults to 0.
3. Though I used Monte Carlo, which seems like a frequentist way to arrive at the confidence interval, it is actually a Bayesian method (see also this paper).
4. There is worry that the number of simulated samples is not sufficient to estimate the percentile when the actual margin is less than the smallest prediction value or larger than the largest prediction value. This happened less than 0.1% of the time for most of the choices of dropout rate and is not the main contributor to the KS test statistic, so it is ignored here.

Grade Inflation

I have been thinking a lot about teaching lately (maybe now that I will not be teaching anymore) and I hope to write a series of a few blog posts about it. My first post here will be on grade inflation, specifically whether curving is an effective way to combat it.

A popular method to combat grade inflation seems to be to impose a set curve for all classes. That is, for example, the top 25% of students get As, the next 35% get Bs and the bottom 40% gets Cs, Ds, and Fs (which is the guideline for my class). While this necessarily avoids the problem of too many people getting As, it can be a bit too rigid, which I will show below.

In the class I teach, there are ~350 students, who are spread among three lectures. I will investigate what effect the splitting of students into the lectures has on their grade. First, I will make an incredibly simple model where I assume there is a "true" ranking of all the students. That is, if all the students were actually in one big class, this would be the ordering of their grades in the course. I will assume that the assessments given to the students in the classes they end up in are completely fair. That is, if their "true" ranking is the highest of anyone in the class, they will get the highest grade in the class and if their "true" ranking is the second highest of anyone in the class they will get the second highest grade and so on. I then assign students randomly to three classes and see how much their percentile in the class fluctuates based on these random choices. This is shown below

The straight black line shows the percentile a student would have gotten had the students been in one large lecture. The black curve above and below it shows the 90% variability in percentile due to random assignment.

We see that even random assignment can cause significant fluctuations, and creates variability particularly for the students in the "middle of the pack." Most students apart from those at the top and bottom could have their letter grade change by a third of a letter grade just due to how the classes were chosen.

Further, this was just assuming the assignment was random. Often, the 8 am lecture has more freshman because they register last and lectures at better times are likely to fill up. There may also be a class that advanced students would sign up for that conflicts with one of the lecture times of my course. This would cause these advanced students to prefer taking the lectures at other times. These effects would only make the story worse from what's shown above.

We have also assumed that each class has the ability to perfectly rank the students from best to lowest. Unfortunately, there is variability in how exam problems are graded and how good questions are at distinguishing students, and so the ranking is not consistent between different lectures. This would tend to randomize positions as well.

Another issue I take with this method of combating grade inflation is that it completely ignores whether students learned anything or not. Since the grading is based on a way to rank students, even if a lecturer is ineffective and thus the students in the course don't learn very much, the student's score will be relatively unchanged. Now, it certainly seems unfair for a student to get a bad grade because their lecturer is poor, but it seems like any top university should not rehire anyone who teaches so poorly that their students learn very little (though I know this is wishful thinking). In particular, an issue here is that how much of the course material students learned is an extremely hard factor to quantify without imposing standards. However, standardized testing leads to ineffective teaching methods (and teaching "to the test") and is clearly not the answer. I'm not aware of a good way to solve this problem, but I think taking data-driven approaches to study this would be extremely useful for education.

In my mind, instead of imposing fixed grade percentages for each of the classes, the grade percentages should be imposed on the course as a whole. That is, in the diagram above, ideally the upper and lower curves would be much closer to the grade in the "true ranking" scenario. Thus, luck or scheduling conflicts have much less of an effect on a students grade. Then the question becomes how to accomplish this. This would mean that sometimes classes would get 40% As and maybe sometimes 15% As, but it would be okay because this is the grade the students should get.

My training in machine learning suggests that bagging would be a great way to reduce the variance. This would mean having three different test problems on each topic and randomly assigning each student one of these three problems. Apart from the logistic nightmare this would bring about, this would really only work when one lecturer is teaching all the classes. For example, if one of the lecturers is much better than another or likes to do problems close to test problems in lecture, then the students will perform better relative to students in other lectures because of their lecturer. To make this work, there needs to be a way to "factor out" the effect of the lecturer.

Another method would be to treat grading more like high school and set rigid grade distributions. The tests would then have to be written in a way such that we'd expect the outcome of the test to follow the guideline grade distributions set by the university, assuming the students in the class follow the general student population. Notably, the test is not written so that the particular course will follow the guideline grade distribution. Of course this is more work than simply writing a test, and certainly, the outcome of a test is hard to estimate. Often I've given tests and been surprised at the outcome, though this is usually due to incomplete information, such as not knowing the instructor did an extremely similar problem as a test problem in class.

One way to implement this would be to look at past tests and look at similar problems, and see how students did on those problems. (Coincidentally, this wasn't possible to do until recently when we started using Gradescope). This gives an idea how we would expect students to perform, and we can use this data to weight the problem appropriately. Of course, we (usually) don't want to give students problems they'll have seen while practicing exams and so it is hard to define how similar a problem is. To do this right requires quite a bit of past data on tests, and as I mentioned earlier this isn't available. Similar problems given by other professors may help, but then we run into the same problem above in that different lecturers will standardize differently from how they decide to teach the course.

Without experimenting with different solutions, it's impossible to figure out what the best solution is, but it seems crazy to accept that curving classes is the best way. Through some work, there could be solutions that encourage student collaboration, reward students for doing their homework (I hope to write more on this in the future) instead of penalizing them for not doing their homework, and take into account how much students are actually learning.

Code for the figure is available here.

Random numbers from a distribution and the Lambert W function

When I was making Physibounce, one of the things that took me a while to figure out is something that is unfortunately barely noticeable in gameplay. When the speed of light becomes small, I wanted the speed distribution of particles to be a 2D Maxwell-Juttner distribution rather than the non-relativistic Maxwell speed distribution. The probability density function for particles allowed to be close to the speed of light is:

Where $v$ is the velocity of the particle, $\gamma(v) = (1-\frac{v^2}{c^2})^{-1/2}$ is the Lorentz factor, $k_B$ is the Boltzmann constant, $m$ is the mass of the mass of the particle, $T$ is the temperature of the system, and $c$ is the speed of light. This distribution will look like a Maxwell distribution in the $c\to\infty$ limit, and is normalized so that $\int_0^c f(v) dv = 1.$

The simplest way to generate random numbers following a distribution is the acceptance-rejection method. This is what I do in Physibounce when the speed of light is not changed. However, I was not able to find an expression for a suitable (and efficient) bound (or maximum value) for the distribution given above. Because of this, I decided to use inverse sampling instead. To do this, I first find the cumulative distribution function as

Amazingly, Mathematica was able to do this analytically. By the definition, it is clear $F$ takes on values in the interval $[0,1].$ Thus, if I find a relation that expressed $v$ in terms of $F$ (equivalent to inverting the function), I have an expression that takes uniform values on the interval $[0,1]$ and maps them to a velocity in the interval $[0,c]$ that follows the desired distribution. Mathematica was also able to do the inversion, but the result was in terms of the Lambert W function.

The Lambert W function is the function that satisfies

So it seems reasonable something like this would come up when inverting the cumulative distribution function. An important thing about this function is that it is double valued! There are two branches. When I asked Mathematica to solve the problem, it chose a branch and the branch it chose turned out to be the wrong one. I wondered for a while why I was not getting reasonable velocity values when I plugged in random numbers, and after a bit I realized I needed to choose the other branch.

The next problem I ran into was that I did know of a way to actually evaluate the Lambert W function in actionscript. So I turned to the asymptotic expansions. It turned out I was in a regime where the argument of the Lambert W tended to be large. I took the first few terms in the expansion about $\infty$ for the Lambert W. I verified that over the parameter ranges I could expect in Physibounce that the difference between the Lambert W and the expansion was less than 1%. Since it's pretty hard to look at the speeds of a bunch of objects and determine the distribution of their speeds, I thought this was more than good enough, though I did include a check to make sure no particles were created with speed greater than $c.$ In the end the code ended up only being a few lines, but quite a bit of thought went into each of the lines!

See the ActionScript code here.