SixFifty's Story: Why Are UK Elections So Hard To Predict?

Hi Everyone! We're back our next event, this time reflecting on recent political events and how Data and Machine Learning can influence it.

Thanks for John from SixFifty (https://sixfifty.org.uk/) to do the talk!

The Plan:

6.30pm - Arrive - Beer, Pizza and Socialising

7pm - Talk - John Sandall:
"SixFifty's Story: Why Are UK Elections So Hard To Predict?"

When Theresa May announced plans on April 18th for the UK to hold a general election it was met with much cynicism. However, as self-confessed psephologists (and huge fans of Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight datablog), we instead were thrilled at the opportunity. SixFifty (https://sixfifty.org.uk/) is a collaboration of data scientists, software engineers, data journalists and political operatives brought together within hours of the snap general election being announced.

Our goals:

• Understand why forecasting elections in the UK using open data is notoriously difficult, and to see how far good statistical practice and modern machine learning methods can take us.

• Make political and demographic data more open and accessible by showcasing and releasing cleaned versions of the datasets we're using.

• We also hope that by communicating our methodology at a non-technical level we will contribute to improving statistical literacy, especially around concepts fundamental to elections, polling and open data.

In this talk we will cover our approach to creating an open polling data pipeline, the challenges we faced especially around data provenance, the infrastructural design decisions made to remain lean under strict resource and time limitations, and the various technologies used to transform PDF polling tables into an election forecast more accurate than any other published prediction using open data.

8pm -More beer, pizza and socialising

8.30pm - To a local watering hole

Hope to see you all there!