Authors
Thomas Rusch, Ilro Lee, Kurt Hornik, Wolfgang Jank, Achim Zeileis
Publication date
2012/3/6
Journal
Available at SSRN 2016956
Description
In political campaigning substantial resources are spent on voter mobilization, that is, on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Campaigns use statistical tools for deciding whom to target ("microtargeting"). In this paper we describe a nonpartisan campaign that aims at increasing overall turnout using the example of the 2004 US presidential election. Based on a real data set of 19,634 eligible voters from Ohio, we introduce a modern statistical framework well suited for carrying out the main tasks of voter targeting in a single sweep: predicting an individual's turnout (or support) likelihood for a particular cause, party or candidate as well as data-driven voter segmentation. Our framework, which we refer to as LORET (for LOgistic REgression Trees), contains standard methods such as logistic regression and classification trees as special cases and allows for a synthesis of both techniques. For …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
T Rusch, I Lee, K Hornik, W Jank, A Zeileis - The Annals of Applied Statistics, 2013