THE STATISTICS OF PREDICTIONS
Nate Silver to talk stats, elections and (inside) baseball in Hampton
Nate Silver is coming to the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton on Tuesday to talk statistical methodology — and how you could predict the next election or NBA finals.
Presidential elections and NBA finals have few things in common, but they do have this: Forecasting the winner is a practical art.
Mathematical modeling that influences forecasts from politics to poker, hurricanes to sports, relies on sifting through a host of knowns and unknowns, and pivoting when necessary.
“What do you do about the fact that events can change and that polls can be wrong?” said Nate Silver, leading statistician, ABC News correspondent and founder and editor-inchief of the award-winning website FiveThirtyEight.
Silver is also the bestselling author of “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t,” which was published in 2012 and inspired The Boston Globe to anoint him “the Kurt Cobain of statistics.”
At 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Silver is set to make a free public presentation at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton, part of NASA Langley Research Center’s monthly Sigma lecture series.
Robert C. Scott, associate director for aerosciences at Langley, said he recommended him for the series.
A self-described “news junkie” who calls Silver a “major get,” Scott also sees the relevance of Silver’s statistical methodology to science and engineering.
“NASA is in the business of generating engineering solutions,” Scott said. “And understanding the level of uncertainty in these solutions is a challenging and ongoing area of research known as uncertainty quantification.
“In similar fashion, Silver’s forecasts provide the probability of certain outcomes rather than simple yes-or-no-type answers.”
Silver’s process of aggregating data from various sources is also similar to developing aerodynamic databases for aerospace vehicles, said Scott.
In a phone call Wednesday, Silver said his presentation will focus largely on election polling and predictions.
It’s a timely topic as presidential campaigns kick off and — at last count — more than 20 major candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Donald Trump.
“That can create chaos and confusion, so how do you deal with stuff like that?” said Silver.
His fans tout that he accurately predicted 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election that won Barack Obama his first term. But Silver knows that nobody is perfect: On Election Day 2016, he had Trump at a 30% chance of besting Hillary Clinton.
It’s far too early to make meaningful predictions for the Democratic nominee or the next U.S. president, he said.
“Polls can only tell you so much when people haven’t really started their shopping process in most states, so to speak,” said Silver.
But even after tickets are set and electioneering heats up, polls are still only snapshots in time, he said, and “it’s important to express the uncertainty.”
“That’s the part that I think sometimes gets lost when people start seeing numbers,” said Silver.
The Air & Space Center is located at 600 Settlers Landing Road.
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