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Showing posts from September, 2016

2016 General Election Prediction

The presidential election is just few days away and this is the perfect time to jump into the prediction game as many others had ( Nate Silver , Sam Wang ,  Drew Linzer , and others). One way to estimate the outcome of the election results is to use data from polls. Many factors can be taken into consideration when performing a projection, such as historical trends, media coverage, debates, etc., but the advantage of considering polls is that it gives a data that is chronologically close to the desired event. We can think about the election as a guessing game: How much does each candidate measure  on election day? We are measuring  each candidate on the population on election day and polls give a good source of information on how this measurement is currently changing. It is important to realize that these measurements are dynamic  and get affected by events.  Every time big polls are published, knowing the current measurement makes it to change . This is known in physical

How the Zika connects Puerto Rico

Given the importance of the recent Zika outbreak, I decided to perform some analysis on how the virus is spreading. I found very good data about Puerto Rico, so decided to focus there. With data from each municipality in Puerto Rico, it is possible to find a connectivity map of the island according to how the virus spreads there. By analyzing the growth of cases over time in each municipality treat them as independent series and performing correlation analysis, we have that the most relevant connectivity groups are given by the following graph. There are 5 clear connectivity groups based on their response to the virus, Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5 And the strongest connectivity is given by the following graph, This connectivity is given by an adjacency matrix obtained by calculating the r² coefficients among the municipalities. In this graphs are displayed only the strongest r² coefficients.