Truemors
Back in February, Nate Silver, a statistician with Baseball Prospectus, was just about the only sports pundit to predict the success of the Tampa Bay Rays. In Sports Illustrated, Silver stopped just short of calling the Rays the best team in the American League, but did predict that they would dramatically improve their record. The prediction was a bold one, considering that the Rays finished last season at the bottom of the standings. Today, the Rays are competing in their first-ever World Series.
In addition to his work for Baseball Prospectus, Silver runs FiveThirtyEight, the wildly popular website that summarizes polling data from around the US. So far, Silver's site suggests that Barack Obama will win the US presidential election by a healthy margin.
Silver has gained fame in both sports and political circles for his statistical analysis. Silver developed a system called PECOTA,(Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) that has put him on the cutting edge of sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball.
Silver's acumen has extended to the world of politics. Silver has used a method comparable to PECOTA to predict the outcomes of political races. His system takes all major polls, assesses their methodologies and previous accuracy, and then runs thousands of simulations to find the most likely outcome.
Earlier this year, Silver predicted the results from the Super Tuesday within 20 delegates of the final split. After that, Silver's site saw a sharp increase in traffic and the 30-year-old has become something of a media darling.
If Silver's website is any indication, things are looking good for Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Silver's site currently has Obama with 344 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed to clinch the election.
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