Forecasting Daily Political Opinion Polls Using the Fractionally Cointegrated Vector Auto-Regressive Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary We examine forecasting performance of the recent fractionally cointegrated vector auto-regressive (FCVAR) model. We use daily polling data of political support in the UK 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 vector auto-regressive 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 cointegrated vector auto-regressive 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 UK Independence Party very closely, and we thus interpret it as a measure of Euroscepticism 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 to the election appear to provide a more informative assessment of the current state of public opinion on electoral support than the hung Parliament prediction of the opinion poll.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".