The Inbetweeners

When it first was shown, I really liked "The Inbetweeners" $-$ it was at times quite rude and cheap, but it did make me laugh, despite the fact that, as it often happens, all the main characters did look a bit older than the age they were trying to portrait...

Anyway, as is increasingly often the case, this post has very little to do with its title and (surprise!) it's again about the model for the UK general election.

There has been lots of talk (including in Andrew Gelman's blog) in the past few days about Yougov's new model, which is based on Gelman's MRP (Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification). I think the model is quite cool and it obviously is very rigorous $-$ it considers a very big poll (with over 50,000 responses), assumes some form of exchangeability to pool information across different individual respondents' characteristics (including geographical area) and then reproportions the estimated vote shares (in a similar way to what my model does) to produce an overall prediction of the final outcome.

Much of the hype (particularly in the British mainstream media), however, has been related to the fact that Yougov's model produces a result that is very different from most of the other poll analyses, ie a much worse performance for the Tories, who are estimated to gain only 304 seats (with a 95% credible interval of 265-342). That's even less than the last general election. Labour are estimated to get 266 (230-300) seats and so there have been hints of a hung parliament, come Friday.

Electoralcalculus (EC) has a short article in their home page to explain the differences in their assessment, which (more in line with my model) still gives the Tories a majority of 361 (to Labour's 216).

As for my model, the very latest estimate is the following:

                mean        sd 2.5% median   97.5%
Conservative 347.870 3.2338147  341    347 355.000
Labour       222.620 3.1742205  216    223 230.000
UKIP           0.000 0.0000000    0      0   0.000
Lib Dem       11.709 2.3103369    7     12  16.000
SNP           48.699 2.0781525   44     49  51.000
Green          0.000 0.0000000    0      0   0.000
PCY            1.102 0.9892293    0      1   2.025
Other          0.000 0.0000000    0      0   0.000

so somewhere in between Yougov and EC (very partisan comment: man how I wish Yougov got it right!).

One of the points that EC explicitly models (although I'm not sure exactly how $-$ the details of their model are not immediately evident, I think) is the poll bias against the Tories. They counter this by (I think) arbitrarily redistributing 1.1% of the vote shares from Labour to the Tories. This probably explains why their model is a bit more favourable to the Conservatives, while being driven by the data in the polls, which seem to suggest Labour are catching up.

I think Yougov model is very extensive and possibly does get it right $-$ after all, speaking only for my own model, Brexit is one of the factors and possibly can act as proxy for many others (age, education, etc). But surely there'll be more than that to make people's mind? Only few more days before we find out...