Nigel Marriott – Page 35

6 Nations #7 – Should there be promotion & relegation?

March 23, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Throughout the 6 Nations this year (and in previous years) there has been a constant debate about whether promotion and relegation should be introduced. A lot of people have stated that Georgia have earned the right to play in the 6 Nations and that Italy have failed to make any progress over the 18 seasons they have been in the 6 Nations. Actually had promotion & relegation been in place this season, Italy would have been relegated and Romania would have been promoted after winning the Rugby Europe Championship with a narrow 8-7 win over Georgia in the last round. This win ended Georgia’s 6 year winning streak.

6 Nations #6 – How did the rankings do in 2017?

March 23, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Ireland’s win over England brought the 2017 6 Nations to a close. England were crowned champions but were not able to top it with back to back grand slams. Over the last few weeks, I have been using the World Rugby Rankings to predict the outcome of the matches and now it is time to see how they performed.

6 Nations #5 – Who will win in 2017? – Week 5

March 13, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

After 3 more matches, world rugby has updated its ranking tables and I can now use these to look the prospects are for each team in the last round of the 2017 6 Nations. I have explained how the rankings work in an earlier 6 Nations post and it is worth reading that to understand how rankings can be a predictive tool. Based on the latest rankings, it looks like France and Scotland will end up in the top half of the final table alongside England who are already the 2017 6 Nations champions.

UK Weather Tracker #1 – February 2017

March 5, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Welcome to the first of my monthly UK weather tracker posts! Every month I will update the charts to show how exceptional or not our weather has been for the last month as well as additional charts that explore our unpredictable weather in more detail. All data used in these posts come from the UK Met Office.

It is early March and outside my window, a cherry tree has started to bud. For my wife this is a welcome sign of spring and marks the end of her second full winter of living in Britain. To go from living in sunny Texas to the unpredictable UK takes some getting used to but as we all know, 2 seasons is not enough to experience the variety of weather that is possible in the UK. I can tell her that on average the average 24-hour temperature was 5 degrees Celsius across the UK this winter but she has no context to judge whether that is a warm or cool winter.

6 Nations #4 – Who will win in 2017? – week 4

March 1, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Round 3 of the 6 Nations is over and we have 3 more games to discuss and dissect. More importantly, world rugby has updated its rankings and I can update my forecasts for round 4 based on these. I explained how the rankings work in my previous 6 Nations post and that is also worth reading to see how the forecast of round 4 now differs from then.

Looking back at that post, it was interesting how the rankings predicted a narrow win for Scotland over Wales. Given that Scotland had not beaten Wales for 10 years that was quite a call and in the event they won the game comfortably. Scotland’s reward is that they are up to #5 in the world rankings, 2 points behind Ireland.

With the updated rankings, here are my revised forecasts for round 4.

UK Opinion Poll Tracker #1 – February 2017

February 25, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Welcome to my first post tracking what the opinion polls are saying in the UK. I will be updating this every month with my comments.

The first chart shows the monthly trends since May 2010. The lines are the opinion polls which are based on centred 9-poll rolling averages. For each month a vertical bar shows by how much the 9-poll average has varied in that month. The square blocks are the vote shares seen in General Elections, the circles are projected national shares from local elections. All data comes from UK Polling Report and Mark Pack’s database.

By-Elections #2 – Review of Copeland & Stoke Central predictions

February 24, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

The results are in and it is now time to review my predictions of the Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central by-elections. How well did my by-election model do and what lessons can be learnt? Let’s look at the numbers first.

Segmentation #1 – Who has more in common? Leave & Trump voters or Remain & Clinton voters? Analysis of Sentiments

February 22, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

My wife is American and so it should be easy to guess what we were talking about on the morning of 9^th November 2016. Donald Trump’s victory in the US Presidential election was a surprise to many people and prompted much discussion on the similarities between Trump voters and the Leave voters in June. However, my wife remarked that people may be looking at this the wrong way round and perhaps the correct question to ask is whether there is greater similarity between Clinton & Remain voters.

Identifying similarities and differences between groups of people is a cornerstone of the field of market research known as customer segmentation. It is one of my favourite areas of statistics and can be used regardless of whether the data comes from a survey or from customer records. When my wife posed her question I immediately thought of 2 ways I could answer this using segmentation methods.

Look at how people feel (their sentiments) which is what this post is about.
Look at how people voted (their behaviour) which I will cover in another post “Who has more in common? Leave & Trump voters or Remain & Clinton voters? Analysis of voting behaviour”

EU Referendum 2016 #2 – Did your constituency vote Remain or Leave?

February 19, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

NOTE 19/2/16: This post is not yet complete. I will do my best to complete it soon as possible. Since I started writing this post, additional data has been made available and I now think that 400 out of 650 seats voted Leave. You can see an outline of my older model in my YouTube clip published in November 2016.

For those used to staying up for election night, the BBC coverage of the EU Referendum on 23rd June 2016 must have been disconcerting. Where were the figures showing how many seats Leave & Remain had won? Unlike a general election where the winner is the party with the largest number of seats, the referendum was decided by a popular vote with Leave winning with 17,410,742 votes to Remain’s 16,141,241 votes.

Also different was that the results were declared for the 399 counting areas (CA) used in EU elections rather than the more familiar 650 parliamentary constituencies. Of the 399 CAs, Leave won a majority in 270 CAs as shown in figure 1. However, the counting areas vary enormously in size from 1,799 eligible voters for the Isles of Scilly to 707,293 eligible voters for the city of Birmingham which makes it difficult to compare CAs. The apparently overwhelming victory for Leave in terms of CAs could be a statistical mirage with Leave winning small CAs and Remain winning large CAs.

By-Election Forecast #2 – Stoke-on-Trent Central, Staffordshire

February 19, 2017 By Nigel Marriott

Originally posted on 19th February 2017. I then added an updated forecast on 22nd February which can be seen at the bottom of this post.

If UKIP want to supplant Labour in the North England, they must win Stoke-on-Trent Central to kickstart this trend and the odds are 2 to 1 that they will win. That is my forecast after running my by-election model on Stoke-on-Trent Central. For more details about the methodology, please read my description of how I forecast by-elections in the Brexit era.

My model uses both the breakdown of the 2015 General Election results when Labour held the seat with a 16% majority on a 50% turnout (the 2^nd lowest turnout in the whole of the UK in 2015) and the 2016 EU referendum result where I estimate that Leave won with 71% of the vote on a 60% turnout. This makes this seat the 17^th most Leave seat in the UK and it is worth noting that its two neighbours were #22 (Stoke South) & #3 (Stoke North). In % terms, the increase in number of voters in 2016 was the 22^nd highest in the UK and has created a substantial Non-GE segment of 17% of 2016 voters that have the potential to influence the by-election. Whether these non-voters from 2015 will vote in the by-election is one of the big uncertainties and it will be fascinating to see if they do.