Fifty years of Australian elections in an alternative electoral reality
Australia has a very unique electoral system, with geographic “districts” (almost universally referred to as electorates) modelled on the British Westminster...
Australia has a very unique electoral system, with geographic “districts” (almost universally referred to as electorates) modelled on the British Westminster...
In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I wrote in 2019.
I wrote last year about how I finally got around to building my own system of organising my notes, thoughts, writings and to-do lists based on emacs and org ...
Following on from a post earlier in the year about multilevel models, I thought I’d follow that post up with a discussion about how multilevel models are com...
I’ve always been interested in physics but somehow, despite my years of studying mathematics, I’d never really properly studied physics outside of a couple o...
People who use org-mode in emacs for sensitive things like keeping a private journal, or recording their unprocessed thoughts on all manner of subjects, have...
This post is about what people usually mean when they use the term “heirarchical regression”, which is one of those confusing terms in statistics that can ha...
I’ve been looking for a system of organising my notes, which represent a sort of “second brain” for my thoughts, for many years. I have thousands of text fil...
On December 12 this year, there were parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom for the third time in five years. The country is in the middle of an unpre...
In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I wrote in 2016, which is itself an updated versi...
At work recently I gave a 90-minute colloquium talk on regression. We have a monthly series of talks where researchers and data scientists discuss fundamenta...
I was recently re-reading some fantastic course notes by the peerless Terence Tao on basic statistics from a fairly high mathematical standpoint as I wanted ...
Deep learning, and in particular deep neural networks, is one of the most popular and powerful tools of modern data science. Using analogies from neuroscien...
New Zealand has a significantly different electoral system to Australia, and just had an interesting election with a fairly unexpected result. I thought it m...
My Google trends scraper is the most popular post on this site, and I’ve been getting questions about it for the last year or so, ever since Google changed t...
The Bias-Variance tradeoff is an extremely important concept in statistical modelling which is often misinterpreted or poorly understood. In this post I’ll g...
This post will explain from scratch how to install MediaWiki on a DigitalOcean droplet, including how to set up Wikipedia-style navigation bars. It’s somethi...
In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I first wrote here in April 2015.
Since moving overseas away from my family and friends nearly two years ago, one problem I have had is keeping in touch with everyone. A combination of distan...
Third parties in Australia have a very peculiar effect on the electoral process. Unlike in American elections, Australian third parties can have a significan...
The below graph of the ALP and Coalition two-party preferred vote from the 2013 election until the eve of the 2016 election contains a massive amount of info...
I spent a few hours today writing a basic first draft of a data-driven text-based “game” which demonstrates just how safe air travel is. The code for the gam...
In this post I want to look at the most difficult seats from the 2013 election for my basic model: those eleven seats whose final two candidates in the runof...
As I’ve recently (and finally) become gainfully employed, I haven’t been able to devote a huge amount of time to my model for forecasting Australian election...
I’ve spent the last few months of my spare time writing code for a model to forecast Australian elections. I’m calling the model Emma Chisit. A very basic fi...
In the previous two posts in this series, I came up with a method of scoring the sentiment of tweets from the Q&A program. I now want to put all these pi...
Up to the limits of my own patience, I hand-classified as many tweets from the April 20 broadcast of QandA as positive, negative (or spam), with the goal of ...
For a while I’ve been keen to learn how to use the Twitter API to scrape tweets. In this post I’ll do some basic sentiment analysis on tweets I scraped durin...
In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup.
I listen to a lot of music and for more than a decade now my main source of discovering new music has been Pitchfork.com, particularly since all my friends o...
Having produced a series of reliability weightings, I scraped Wikipedia for opinion polls for this year’s election in the last thirty days (following methodo...
The Israeli electoral system is completely different to the Australian system. 120 representatives are elected to the Knesset from a single at-large electora...
In this post we’ll use census data to cluster Australian federal electorates according to their demographic similarity. This is a good exercise for me to use...
In a series of posts last year (starting here) I discussed the difficulties in building a model for predicting Australian elections. In the next series of po...
This post is an attempt for me to organise in my own head an answer to a question I’m asked all the time: what was your PhD about?
UPDATE 2 (18/2/2017): I have fixed the code so the trendy scraper is now working again. The updated code is in Github and there is a post on the blog here. I...
In this post I’ll explain why it’s difficult to economic index to include in our model. In the FiveThirtyEight model, the underlying idea is that a strong ec...
There are plenty of existing models on the web for forecasting elections, or at the very least analysing and aggregating polls. As far as I’m aware, none pro...
As a fantastic bulwark against gerrymandering, and in a democratic statement that should be the envy of democracies worldwide, electoral districts in Austral...
A successful forecasting model for elections in Australia needs to take into account its unique preferential voting system. In federal elections, voters are ...
It is worthwhile noting that FiveThirtyEight does not attempt to forecast US congressional elections on a district-by-district basis (instead providing a pro...
In recent years, statistical approaches to electoral forecasting have become particularly popular. The most famous example in the past decade has been the ri...
Gumtree.com.au is a trading post website, largely used by private sellers interacting with each other off-site to sell used goods. One particularly common us...