

Nate Silver of 538 Signs With Penguin In Two Book Deal - brm
http://www.observer.com/2008/media/nate-silver-signs-penguin-two-book-deal-worth-sum-high-six-figures

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kqr2
Hopefully he will reveal more technical details about his statistical methods.

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aneesh
When you're making predictions based off complex models like he is,
transparency gives you more credibility. There's actually a pretty good
description here: [http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-
ques...](http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/03/frequently-asked-questions-
last-revised.html)

Go through that page with a basic statistical package, plus maybe Wikipedia
for reference and you can probably see most of what he did.

~~~
kqr2
Well, I was hoping for more details than a brief answer to a FAQ.

See this earlier post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=356461>

 _His baseball projections are based on a proprietary algorithm (PECOTA)._

From wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA> :

 _detailed formulas are proprietary and have not been shared with the baseball
research community._

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aneesh
Well, he lists all the variables in the regression he uses, tells you where he
gets the polls, how he weights them, how he adjusts for timing, how he
incorporates the regression results, etc. The FAQ is anything but brief --
there are LOTS of little links where he specifies all the details.

I agree it's not super well-documented where you can just plug-in numbers and
go, but it seems like he provides the details that someone else would need to
do something similar.

It depends on your goal. If you want to exactly replicate his work, you'd need
access to the exact same data, and maybe he hasn't specified exactly what he
uses to train the regression model. But if you just want to do something
similar, the ingredients are all right there.

Also, re: the "proprietary" formula, it means that you don't know the specific
parameters his model uses. But if you just want to learn how to do something
similar (which is what it seems like is your goal), the information is all
there. The methods aren't proprietary at all.

