Backtesting Ahead
By Neil Stevens on March 15, 2010
While playing around with primary polling lets me practice how I look at an individual poll, it does nothing for my work on aggregating polls and creating national projections.
So if I can get the historical election week polling data I expect to start doing some backtesting over the spring and early summer. I’ll come up with models and test them by “projecting” past House elections, Senate elections, and Presidential elections.
Whichever model works best I will use to project the 2010 midterms. Additionally I’ll learn which pollsters are better than others, which will only improve my projections.