Forecasting daily political opinion polls using the fractionally cointegrated VAR model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine forecasting performance of the recent fractionally cointegrated vector autoregressive (FCVAR) model. We use daily polling data of political support in the United Kingdom for 2010-2015 and compare with popular competing models at several forecast horizons. Our findings show that the four variants of the FCVAR model considered are generally ranked as the top four models in terms of forecast accuracy, and the FCVAR model significantly outperforms both univariate fractional models and the standard cointegrated VAR (CVAR) model at all forecast horizons. The relative forecast improvement is higher at longer forecast horizons, where the root mean squared forecast error of the FCVAR model is up to 15% lower than that of the univariate fractional models and up to 20% lower than that of the CVAR model. In an empirical application to the 2015 UK general election, the estimated common stochastic trend from the model follows the vote share of the UKIP very closely, and we thus interpret it as a measure of Euro-skepticism in public opinion rather than an indicator of the more traditional left-right political spectrum. In terms of prediction of vote shares in the election, forecasts generated by the FCVAR model leading into the election appear to provide a more informative assessment of the current state of public opinion on electoral support than the hung government prediction of the opinion poll.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".