Sunday 19 October 2014

2015 UK Parliamentary Election Forecast (19th OCT)

This report was generated on 19 October 2014 at 09:14. To read commentary on the election using these forecasts, follow Election4castUK on Twitter. If you would like to give us feedback on this forecast, please email us at

Party Lo Seats Hi Swing
Conservatives 233 277 319 -29
Labour 261 304 344 46
Liberal Democrats 14 25 38 -32
SNP 12 20 28 14
Plaid Cymru 0 2 4 -1
Greens 0 0 1 -1
UKIP 1 3 7 3
Other 1 1 2 0
Our current prediction is that there will be no overall majority, but that Labour will be the largest party with 304 seats. However, based on the historical relationships between the sources of information we are using in our forecast and the outcome of UK elections, we know there is substantial uncertainty in our forecast. The sidebar at right includes predictive probabilities of the key outcomes of the election, as well as vote and seat forecasts for each party with 90% uncertainty intervals.
  • And now the party forecast...
    • Conservatives. Fading slightly over the past fortnight. Seat loss very likely. Majority very unlikely. Plurality moderately unlikely.
    • Labour. Fading slightly. Seat gain almost certain. Majority unlikely. Plurality probable.
    • Liberal Democrats. Holding steady. Seat loss almost certain.
    • SNP. Holding steady. Seat gain almost certain.
    • Plaid Cymru. Holding steady. Seat loss probable.
    • Greens. Holding steady. Seat loss possible.
    • UKIP. Rising. Seat gain almost certain.
Seat-by-seat predictions based on the party predicted to be most likely to win each seat.

Saturday 18 October 2014

Electoral Calculus #GE2015 Forecast

Current Prediction: Labour majority 42

Party2010 Votes2010 SeatsPred VotesPred Seats
CON36.97%30731.22%242
LAB29.66%25835.98%346
LIB23.56%57 8.01%18
UKIP 3.17%015.02%0
NAT 2.26%9 3.37%25
MIN 4.37%19 6.40%19
Prediction based on opinion polls from 29 Aug 14 to 25 Sep 14, sampling 10,069 people.

Probability of possible outcomes

Conservative majority
7%
Labour majority
63%
Con/Lib coalition
3%
Lab/Lib coalition
11%
Lib choice of coalition
0%
No overall control
17%
The future is never certain. But using our advanced modelling techniques, we can estimate the probability of the various possible outcomes at the next general election.

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html

#GE2015 Forecast by UK Election Trend

I'm not committing to coming back to regular updates, but here's the output of a model I've put together for the 2015 elections. This runs 2000 individually simulated elections, using minor random variations on data from current polling. That way we can see what the possibility space for the election results look like.


Here we see that in the simulated election, both the Conservatives and Labour don't have their most likely positions in place to get a majority of seats. But we can notice that Labour have a second small peak closer to the majority needed, so may well be much better placed than they look, and it's not entirely ruled out that they could get a majority. However, a majority is still unlikely.

This result comes about because my model is very pessimistic for labour at the moment, as the underlying trends look weak after being disrupted by conference season.

A few tweaks to the internals of the simulation (and this time ensuring all 2000 runs are put into the graph, not just 1000 of them) and here's another seat spread...


As you can see, the most common result puts Labour short of a majority. But again we see a second peak just after majority, that suggests a significant chance of a majority. The non-uniform nature of the distribution of seats does mean this kind of quirk can pop-up.

And here's a somewhat familiar trend graph from recent polling, which shows what rough area you could expect the vote shares to be in if trends continued. It's an important caveat that trends almost never continue without some change. It's somewhat difficult to identify if election polling follows a power or a polynomial trend, and some times a party's path towards election day can look like one or the other. So this graph has a Y split showing how the two different types of trend prediction diverge.
You'll note that the trend for UKIP looks pretty good for them, but I'm the model isn't showing them winning any seats. Which you might think is odd, because UKIP now have an MP from a by-election. There's a simple reason for this, the model doesn't know about by-elections. In my previous model, I attempted to use by-elections as a data point, this was a mistake. By-elections do not have a strong link to general-elections, and there's strong historical precedent for not applying swing calculations to a seat's by-election result, including many cases where a change due to by-election was over-turned at the following general election. As such, the seat predictions work based on how the seat was at the 2010 general election. I think this will better model a national general election, rather than using data from by-elections where an entire party and media circus is focused on a single seat.
 
A little more tweaking to the internals, and adding in today's YouGov.


This also gives a rough prediction of the probability of either Conservative or Labour having a majority in the House of Commons, currently on 39% for Labour and 2% for Conservative.

Known problems with the model so far: SNP seat projections are problematic, and probably benefiting Labour a fair amount, but this is hard to fix without special casing SNP marginals. UKIP seats don't include any wins in ByElections, again this would require special casing to try and predict if they will retain them at the General Election. The Polynomal trend line can not be used in the election simulation for technical reasons, so Labour's vote share is probably a little low. This probably compensates for phantom gains from the SNP now, but probably not closer to the election. However, this is a tiny number of seats being predicted, and within variation of any close result.

Recent fixes to the model: Standard distribution now used for the election simulation, rather than a flat random variation. Reduced over-confidence that the trends are correct. Introduced a Consumer Confidence rating based limit to the weight of "return to mean" tightening of the result.
 
from
 

UK Polling report #GE2015 Forecast

269 331 22 10 18


The standard method of translating shares of the vote into seats is to use a uniform swing calculation. This means that the national change in vote share for each party is applied to each individual seat to see how that would effect the result, and then these theoretical results in each seat are totted up to produce a projection for House of Commons.
This is a crude measure and can result in some illogical and impossible projections – for example, if a poll showed Labour support dropping by 13%, as one poll did during Summer 2008, then a uniform swing calculation using those figures would project Labour getting less than zero votes in 48 seats. This is clearly nonsense. Such projections also ignore any regional variations, tactical considerations or variations due to incumbency effects of new MPs or MPs standing down. Despite all these drawbacks, it normally does a reasonably good job and, given that it is a straight extrapolation of current voting figures it is at least accepted as a fair projection that is not at the whim of individual guesswork or assumptions.

link to forecast

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/ukpr-projection-2

Tuesday 14 October 2014

2015 UK Parliamentary Election Forecast (14th OCT

This report was generated on 14 October 2014 at 21:33. To read commentary on the election using these forecasts, follow Election4castUK on Twitter. If you would like to give us feedback on this forecast, please email us at feedback@electionforecast.co.uk


Our current prediction is that there will be no overall majority, but that the Conservatives will be the largest party with 294 seats. However, based on the historical relationships between the sources of information we are using in our forecast and the outcome of UK elections, we know there is substantial uncertainty in our forecast. The sidebar at right includes predictive probabilities of the key outcomes of the election, as well as vote and seat forecasts for each party with 90% uncertainty intervals.
  • And now the party forecast...
    • Conservatives. Holding steady over the past fortnight. Seat loss probable. Majority unlikely. Plurality possible.
    • Labour. Fading slightly. Seat gain very likely. Majority very unlikely. Plurality possible.
    • Liberal Democrats. Holding steady. Seat loss almost certain.
    • SNP. Holding steady. Seat gain almost certain.
    • Plaid Cymru. Holding steady. Seat loss probable.
    • Greens. Holding steady. Seat loss possible.
    • UKIP. Rising slightly. Seat gain almost certain.



Party Lo Seats Hi Swing
Conservatives 249 294 340 -12
Labour 246 293 334 35
Liberal Democrats 14 23 36 -34
SNP 10 17 25 11
Plaid Cymru 0 2 4 -1
Greens 0 0 1 -1
UKIP 1 2 5 2
Other 1 1 3 0
Seat-by-seat predictions based on the party predicted to be most likely to win each seat.

Monday 13 October 2014

2015 UK Parliamentary Election Forecast (13th OCT)

This report was generated on 13 October 2014 at 18:13. To read commentary on the election using these forecasts, follow Election4castUK on Twitter. If you would like to give us feedback on this forecast, please email us at feedback@electionforecast.co.uk

Our current prediction is that there will be no overall majority, but that the Conservatives will be the largest party with 297 seats. However, based on the historical relationships between the sources of information we are using in our forecast and the outcome of UK elections, we know there is substantial uncertainty in our forecast. The sidebar at right includes predictive probabilities of the key outcomes of the election, as well as vote and seat forecasts for each party with 90% uncertainty intervals.
  • And now the party forecast...
    • Conservatives. Holding steady over the past fortnight. Seat loss probable. Majority unlikely. Plurality possible.
    • Labour. Fading slightly. Seat gain very likely. Majority unlikely. Plurality possible.
    • Liberal Democrats. Rising slightly. Seat loss almost certain.
    • SNP. Holding steady. Seat gain almost certain.
    • Plaid Cymru. Holding steady. Seat loss very likely.
    • Greens. Holding steady. Seat loss moderately unlikely.
    • UKIP. Holding steady. Seat gain almost certain.
Party Lo Seats Hi Swing
Conservatives 248 297 347 -9
Labour 244 292 335 34
Liberal Democrats 13 24 38 -33
SNP 7 12 18 6
Plaid Cymru 1 2 3 -1
Greens 0 1 1 0
UKIP 0 3 6 3
Other 1 1 1 0
Seat-by-seat predictions based on the party predicted to be most likely to win each seat.

Who would you vote for? Who do you think will win? #GE2015 Result

Thank you for all those who took part. well over 330 opinions in under a day.

It wasn't scientific and may say more about who follows the blogs, or who are the most active at responding to polls, but here are the results

THANK YOU FOR TAKING PART.


Sunday 12 October 2014

Who will you vote for? Who do you think will win? #GE2015

http://ukgeneralelection2015.blogspot.co.uk/

Above is our current blog, and when the General Election is completed we will be moving to this blog. So over the coming months we will be slowly getting this one bedded in. So to begin with we are running a easy poll.

There is 2 links

1st Question is asking you who would you vote for in the General Election if you had chance to.

http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=543a996fe4b0b5175a3db838 <<< link to 1st Question

2nd Question is who do you think will win the General Election

http://www.easypolls.net/poll.html?p=543a9a32e4b0b5175a3db83a  <<< link to 2nd Question

Thank you for taking part.

The result of the poll can be found here, the poll is now closed.

LINK TO RESULT OF THE POLL