Forest Simmons wrote: > What if the polls could tell us (for each i and j) what percentage of the > voters approve both candidates i and j. If that percentage is not close > to the product of the percentages of approval for i and approval for j, it > would tell us that that approval for i and j are statistically related; > perhaps the nature of this relationship might be useful information for > approval strategy. > > This information wouldn't require additional questionaires, only summing > n*(n-1)/2 combinations from each existing questionaire (where n is the > number of candidates).
See my April 12 post. I defined Bij(X) as the probability that i will beat j if i has exactly X votes. If we know nothing about the relationship between i and j votes, then for this value we can substitute the cumulative probability that I called Cj(X). A correlation (or an anti-correlation) of i and j votes would skew Bij(X). So if you had the n*(n-1)/2 sums, then perhaps you could determine how to skew the Cj(X) values to get accurate Bij(X) values. I don't know what that calculation would look like, though. How good are you at statistical formulas? -- Richard ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
