MinneMUDAC 2018

Model Citizens

Abe Eyman Casey, Alex Son, Brodie Thiede, Jack Welsh

Predictions

  • We predict 2414187 votes or 54.7% voter turnout for all of Minnesota
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Twitter API

  • Used Twitter’s APIs to gather Tweets from the profiles of candidates from MN running for office during the 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections
  • Collected metrics and utilized natural language processing and sentiment analysis on the Tweets’ content

Random Forest

  • We choose to use Random Forest (the randomForest package in R) to investigate turnout.
  • We chose Random Forest because of its overall robustness. Random Forest doesn’t have conditions and doesn't have problems with multicollinearity if given correlated explanatory variables.
  • Cross Validation - We performed 100 fold cross validation using the rfUtilities package in R to examine the performance of our models.

Where we got our data from

  • American Fact Finder for all demographic data
  • Minnesota Department of State for historic voter turnout data
  • Twitter API for all Twitter data.
  • OpenSecrets.org for the candidate fundraising data.
  • Minnesota State Demographic Center for the economic data

Predictions

  • We predict 54.7% voter turnout for all of Minnesota