the data diary
2024 Presidential Forecast
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the data diary
A scratchpad for statistics, politics, and other odd lots
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(21)
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dropout
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healthcare
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nplyr
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personal
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politics
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rstats
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stan
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surveys
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survival
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tidymodels
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workboots
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Stay in touch
Um, Factually
stan
dropout
A power ranking for the title of most pedantic nerd on Dropout’s
Um, Actually
Mark Rieke
Oct 6, 2024
A forecast of the 2024 presidential election
stan
politics
The methodology behind the model
Mark Rieke
Jul 4, 2024
No, Biden shouldn’t be replaced as the Democratic nominee
stan
politics
If you want to see a Democrat in the white house next year, Biden is your best bet
Mark Rieke
Jun 28, 2024
Churn, baby, churn
stan
survival
A survivor’s guide to estimating customer lifetime from discrete censored churn data
Mark Rieke
Nov 24, 2023
A Change to the Time for Change
politics
stan
How to think about (and avoid thinking about) the presidential election in 500 days
Mark Rieke
Jul 9, 2023
3-PVI
politics
A new metric for measuring regional partisanship
Mark Rieke
May 23, 2023
Free lunch at the vectorization table
bayes
stan
rstats
Reparameterizing multinomial models for better computational efficiency
Mark Rieke
Apr 26, 2023
Gauss’ Goal Generation
bayes
stan
healthcare
rstats
Using gaussian process models for hospital goal setting
Mark Rieke
Mar 19, 2023
Mr. P and the Multiverse of Madness
bayes
stan
surveys
MRP
Estimating population results from non-representative survey samples using multilevel regression and post-stratification
Mark Rieke
Feb 15, 2023
Trump vs. Desantis in 2024 Republican Primary Polling
politics
bayes
stan
Mixed scales lead to mixed results
Mark Rieke
Jan 21, 2023
My 2022 Magnum Opus
rstats
stan
bayes
healthcare
Ordered categorical models for estimating Net Promoter Score: a hierarchical Bayesian implementation
Mark Rieke
Dec 30, 2022
Chief Twit
rstats
A causal look at how Musk’s twitter ownership has affected Tesla stock
Mark Rieke
Dec 16, 2022
Hierarchical Hospitals
rstats
stan
bayes
healthcare
Multilevel Models for Patient Satisfaction
Mark Rieke
Nov 14, 2022
Forecast Launch!
politics
A look under the hood of the 2022 Midterm Model
Mark Rieke
Sep 19, 2022
Finding new wedding bops with {tidyclust} and {spotifyr}
rstats
tidymodels
Last November, I (finally) popped the big question and proposed! Since then, my fiance and I have been diligently planning our wedding. While we have most of the big-ticket…
Mark Rieke
Aug 20, 2022
Introducing {nplyr}
rstats
nplyr
A grammar of (nested) data manipulation
Mark Rieke
Jul 24, 2022
The Math Behind workboots
rstats
workboots
tidymodels
Generating prediction intervals with workboots hinges on a few core concepts: bootstrap resampling, estimating prediction error for each resample, and aggregating the…
Mark Rieke
Jul 5, 2022
Estimate your uncertainty
rstats
bayes
Modeling patient satisfaction data with empirical Bayesian methods
Mark Rieke
Jun 12, 2022
Practical Data Visualization Tips for Excel Users
rstats
Improving a plot, one step at a time
Mark Rieke
May 31, 2022
“30 is not Statistical”
rstats
Organizational resistance to uncertainty
Mark Rieke
Apr 28, 2022
Impeachment Republicans and Democracy
politics
How republicans who voted to impeach or acquit Donald Trump differ in their votes on democracy
Mark Rieke
Apr 6, 2022
Introducing {workboots}
rstats
tidymodels
workboots
Generate bootstrap prediction intervals from a tidymodel workflow!
Mark Rieke
Mar 14, 2022
The Data Science Hierarchy of Needs
rstats
Why you should put a roof on your house before hiring an interior decorator
Mark Rieke
Feb 22, 2022
Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps
rstats
tidymodels
Using bootstrap resamples to generate confidence intervals from non-linear models
Mark Rieke
Feb 8, 2022
How Popular is Joe Biden?
politics
Building a Presidential Approval Model
Mark Rieke
Jan 26, 2022
The Data Diary: Year in Review
personal
In the year since I started this blog, there’s been a lot that’s happened: I learned to use R, picked up the basics of machine learning, and moved into a new job/industry. I…
Mark Rieke
Jan 12, 2022
Do Voters Want Democrats or Republicans in Congress?
politics
Building a Generic Ballot Poll Aggregator
Mark Rieke
Dec 14, 2021
Technical Books!
rstats
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! This year, my family drove down to Houston for the holiday & I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time. We played lots of games and ate well -…
Mark Rieke
Nov 28, 2021
Diamonds are Forever
tidymodels
Feature Engineering with the Diamonds Dataset
Mark Rieke
Nov 14, 2021
Election Night: Some Closing Thoughts on the VA Governor Race
politics
A few weeks ago I had written about the VA Governor’s race before going on vacation - in that time it seems as though Terry McAuliffe’s campaign had lost a lot of steam and…
Mark Rieke
Nov 2, 2021
Polling Average of the VA Governor’s Race using purrr::map functions
politics
Rolling poll averages can be misleading in the absence of errorbars or an expected distribution of outcomes. FiveThirtyEight is currently tracking polls of Virginia’s…
Mark Rieke
Oct 19, 2021
RStudio’s Call for Documentation
archive
rstats
In my job, I spend a good amount of time working in the platform setup by our survey vendor, Qualtrics. There are some pre-formatted reports that we can send on a recurring…
Mark Rieke
Oct 5, 2021
Catching Up (again)
archive
Wow, it’s been quite a while! Once again, I’m catching up from a long hiatus (this time, there was about a month’s gap between posts). Although I haven’t been writing here…
Mark Rieke
Sep 23, 2021
Tidymodels and the Titanic
archive
rstats
tidymodels
This week, I thought I’d do something a bit different. I’ve been working with & getting used to tidymodels, a suite of R packages for building machine learning models with…
Mark Rieke
Aug 8, 2021
The Gas Price Fallacy
archive
politics
As America has vaccinated its population, life has seemingly begun to return to the pre-pandemic normal. Businesses have been opening to higher levels of capacity, schools…
Mark Rieke
Jul 18, 2021
Blexas?
archive
politics
Last year, Donald Trump won Texas’ 38 electoral votes handily, earning 52% of the vote compared to Biden’s 46% (R+6). Taken on its own, this is hardly surprising - Texas has…
Mark Rieke
Jul 11, 2021
COVID Cases Improve with Introduction of Vaccines
archive
As vaccines have become widely available in the US, new COVID cases and deaths have dropped significantly from winter peak, with the 7-day average for both cases and deaths…
Mark Rieke
Jun 3, 2021
President of the Polls
archive
politics
Elliot Morris wrote in his newsletter last week about the increase in the public’s opinion that the government ought to be doing more. A summary of the last twenty years of…
Mark Rieke
May 5, 2021
A Lukewarm Case for DC Statehood
archive
politics
Once again, I’ll be keeping this very short, as I’ve continued to primarily focus on building out the demographic/economic database. I, did, however, sneak in some time to…
Mark Rieke
Apr 27, 2021
Catching Up
archive
The past few weeks have been a bit lite (read::absent) in terms of posting updates. When not taking the machine learning course, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time…
Mark Rieke
Apr 20, 2021
Seasonality is a Weak Predictor of Border Crossings
archive
politics
Last week, the Washington Post published an article postulating that the recent increase in crossings at the border cannot be attributed to Biden administration policies…
Mark Rieke
Apr 5, 2021
Recent Works
archive
One of the history teachers at my highschool was known for his prolific catchphrase, “give me the stuff, not the fluff,” often uttered to students attempting to submit…
Mark Rieke
Mar 15, 2021
aRtwork!
archive
This week, I did something a bit different - the artwork above was made in R! The code to create the graph is actually pretty short, only taking up 28 lines. The bulk of the…
Mark Rieke
Mar 7, 2021
Doug Collins Saved Raphael Warnock’s Senate Bid
archive
politics
I’ll be honest - prior to writing this post, I had never heard of Doug Collins (R), the third major candidate in the race for Georgia’s special senate election after Raphael…
Mark Rieke
Feb 28, 2021
(Kind of) Projecting the 2020 Election
archive
politics
I’m about 4 months too late, but to practice forecasting, I made a modest projection for the 2020 national popular vote using polling data from the two weeks leading up to…
Mark Rieke
Feb 21, 2021
Scorecasting
archive
politics
A baseball forecast that correctly predicts the winner of the 15 opening day games could be a truly accurate model, or could just be getting lucky. Over the course of 6…
Mark Rieke
Feb 14, 2021
Some Worthwhile Links
archive
Rather than diving deep into a topic this week, I took a bit of a break to focus on playing catchup with the stats course I’m taking. Instead, I’ve listed out below a number…
Mark Rieke
Feb 8, 2021
The Min-Wage Debate
archive
politics
On January 26, House Democrats introduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025. In the weeks leading up to the introduction…
Mark Rieke
Jan 31, 2021
Your Doctor Probably Isn’t an Idiot
archive
bayes
There’s a great standup routine about doctors (which I spent about an hour trying to find online with no luck!) with a punchline to the effect of, “getting a positive cancer…
Mark Rieke
Jan 24, 2021
R, ggplot2, & plotly
archive
Editor’s note: I’ve gone back & read my previous post, & have one general thought - yeeeesh… Everything is so… “matter of fact” in tone & doesn’t really sound like me. I’ll…
Mark Rieke
Jan 17, 2021
Baby Steps
archive
Today marks the beginning of what I imagine will be a long journey, with a significant number of hiccups & frustrations along the way. The end goal I have is to build out an…
Mark Rieke
Jan 10, 2021
Hello World!
archive
I’m currently setting up the website & will have an official post soon(ish).
Mark Rieke
Jan 9, 2021
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