Nate Silver originally gained his reputation as a baseball statistical analyst, where his mathematical models—including the famous PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) system—have been accurately forecasting baseball outcomes for years.
During the 2008 presidential election primaries, Silver turned his predictive abilities and forecasting models to the game of politics and current events — with impressive results. He began by predicting 2008 primary election results with great accuracy — and often in opposition to the better-known political pollsters. He then moved on to the general election, where he correctly predicted the presidential winner in 49 states and the District of Columbia.
Silver’s founded the award winning political website, FiveThirtyEight.com, which is now a blog for the New York Times. On the website, he crunches data, statistical studies, polls, election results, demographics, and voting patterns to publish a running forecast of a wide variety of current events, including the UK elections, the US midterm elections, health care passage, immigration issues, and more.
In his upcoming book is The Signal and The Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t.
Silver holds a BA in Economics from the University of Chicago.
