IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
Introduction to Business Analytics
IIMT2641
Tutorial 04 - Logistic Regression
IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
United States Presidential Elections
• A president is elected every four years
• Generally, only two competitive candidates
– Republican
– Democratic
Official presidential photos are in the public domain
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
The Electoral College
• The United States have 50 states
• Each assigned a number of electoral votes based
on population
– Most votes: 55 (California)
– Least votes: 3 (multiple states)
– Reassigned periodically based on population change
• Winner takes all: candidate with the most votes in a
state gets all its electoral votes
• Candidate with most electoral votes wins election
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
2000 Election: Bush vs. Gore
2000 U.S. election map is in the public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
Election Prediction
• Goal: Use polling data
to predict state winners
• Then-New York Times
columnist Nate Silver
famously took on this
task for the 2012
election
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
The Dataset
• Data from RealClearPolitics.com
• Instances represent a state in a given election
– State: Name of state
– Year: Election year (2004, 2008, 2012)
• Dependent variable
– Republican: 1 if Republican won state, 0 if Democrat
won
• Independent variables
– Rasmussen, SurveyUSA: Polled R% - Polled D%
– DiffCount: Polls with R winner – Polls with D winner
– PropR: Polls with R winner / # polls
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
Simple Approaches to Missing Data
• Delete the missing observations
– We would be throwing away more than 50% of the
data
– We want to predict for all states
• Delete variables with missing values
– We want to retain data from Rasmussen/SurveyUSA
• Fill missing data points with average values
– The average value for a poll will be close to 0 (tie
between Democrat and Republican)
– If other polls in a state favor one candidate, the
missing one probably would have, too
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IIMT2641
Introduction to Business Analytics
Multiple Imputation
• Fill in missing values based on non-missing values
– If Rasmussen is very negative, then a missing
SurveyUSA value will likely be negative
– Just like sample.split, results will differ between runs
unless you fix the random seed
• Although the method is complicated, we can use it
easily through R’s libraries
• We will use Multiple Imputation by Chained
Equations (mice) package
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