philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Who does A.I. think will win today’s election?

Most of these systems look at data from social media and then use sentiment analysis—which categorizes the emotions expressed in a text—to figure out whether a particular post is in favor or against a certain candidate. The systems then try to find a correlation between the quantity and quality of these expressions and voting patterns.

Studies have shown that A.I. systems designed in this way can predict election outcomes, sometimes more accurately than polls. In 2016, several A.I. systems based on social media analysis accurately forecast Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, even though most poll-based forecasts put Clinton in the White House.

But such systems aren’t infallible. The same A.I. software that worked well for India and Pakistan, for instance, failed to accurately forecast an election in Malaysia.

So what are such systems saying about today’s vote? A system designed by a company called KCore Analytics forecasts that Biden will win the popular vote handily, but that his Electoral College margin will be razor-thin.

Similarly, the Italian-based A.I. company Expert.AI saw Biden in the lead, but only by a few percentage points—a much smaller margin than the seven-point lead Biden has in an average of national polls. 

But Polly Pollster, an A.I. system created by Advanced Symbolics that correctly forecast both the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2019 Canadian elections, predicts that Biden will win easily, with Trump having only about an 8% chance of pulling off an upset. This forecast is similar to the non-A.I. one based on combining various state-level polls that is put together by FiveThirtyEight. It predicts that Biden has a 90% chance of winning. 

These systems work in different ways. One system used deep learning to successfully predict the Indian election results, categorizing sentiment and then feeding those results into another neural network that correlates that sentiment with an election result.

See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2020/11/03/who-will-win-todays-election-a-i-knows/