September 8, 2014

Poll meta-analyses in NZ

By

As we point out from time to time, single polls aren’t very accurate and you need sensible averaging.

There are at least three sets of averages for NZ:

1. Peter Green’s analyses, which get published at DimPost (larger parties, smaller parties). The full code is here.

2. Pundit’s poll of polls. They have a reasonably detailed description of their approach and it follows what Nate Silver did for the US elections.

3. Curiablog’s time and size weighted average. Methodology described here

The implementors of these cover a reasonable spectrum of NZ political affiliation. The results agree fairly closely except for one issue: Peter Green adds a correction to make the predictions go through the 2011 election results, which no-one else does.

According to Gavin White, there is a historical tendency for National to do a bit worse and NZ First to do a bit better in the election than in the polls, so you’d want to correct for this, but you could also argue that the effect was stronger than usual at the last election so this might overcorrect.

In addition to any actual changes in preferences over the next couple of weeks, there are three polling issues we don’t have a good handle on:

  • Internet Mana is new, and you could make a plausible case that their supporters might be harder for the  pollers to get a good grip on (note: age and ethnicity aren’t enough here, the pollers do take account of those).
  • There seems to have been a big increase in ‘undecided‘ responders to the polls, apparently from former Labour voters. To the extent that this is new, no-one really knows what they will do on the day.
  • Polling for electorates is harder, especially when strategic voting is important, as in Epsom.

 

[Update: thanks to Bevan Weir in comments, there’s also a Radio NZ average. It’s a simple unweighted average with no smoothing, which isn’t ideal for estimation but has the virtue of simplicity]

avatar

Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments