In the months leading up to Election Day, pollsters placed voters under the microscope, parsing data from telephone surveys and past voting trends to determine probable outcomes. By Tuesday evening, as results veered from predictions, it was the pollsters’ turn under the microscope.
There are alternative ways of assessing sentiment, though. Some technology experts say artificial intelligence, used increasingly by companies to gauge customer sentiment, could hold promise for better understanding the electorate.
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“I wouldn’t fire the pollsters, but I would direct them to try to leverage machine learning, data mining and AI in their work more to get better projections,” said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research center in Seattle.
The size of this year’s polling error is still unknown as the vote count continues. But polls generally predicted clear Democratic gains, not cliffhangers.
No person or algorithm can predict human behavior accurately all the time, said Heidi Messer, chairman of New York-based Collective[i], which offers AI and predictive technologies for sales teams. But the problem with traditional polls is that the designations pollsters use are based on historical classifications and averages.
Polling will need to find a data source that captures actual behavior the way tech firms such as
Amazon.com Inc.
do. “Amazon’s algorithm doesn’t care if I’m a person or a dog, it just knows that if I buy a leash, I’m likely to buy kibble,” she said.
She added: “Data reflecting behavior is much harder to amass but infinitely more useful in dynamically identifying the patterns and correlations that fuel probabilistic predictions.”
A few AI companies have used their models to make election predictions.
Expert.ai, an Italian software company specializing in natural-language processing, applied its technology to millions of social posts around the candidates. Its AI system, trained partly on past elections, analyzed factors such as tone and emotion and projected how that might translate into votes.
Expert.ai’s system projected that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would win 50.2% of the popular vote and Republican President Donald Trump would get 47.3% of the vote, a 2.9 percentage-point margin. As of Friday afternoon, Mr. Biden had 50.5% of the popular vote compared with Mr. Trump’s 47.8%, a 2.7 percentage-point margin. (Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, is an…
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