Politics News Report:A highly reliable statistical model has predicted a Donald Trump presidency, and an artificial intelligence system that has gone three-for-three in the last three presidential elections is following suit...
Politics News Report:
A highly reliable statistical model has predicted a Donald Trump presidency, and an artificial intelligence system that has gone three-for-three in the last three presidential elections is following suit.MogAI, an AI system developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian healthcare startup Genic.ai, predicts a Donald Trump presidency, CNBC reports.
MogAI – which was named after Mowgli from "The Jungle Book" because, like the young "man cub," it learns from the environment – correctly predicted the outcomes of the last three presidential elections, as well as the results of the Democratic and Republican primaries. It uses information from public platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to generate a prediction of voting behavior.
According to the data, people are 25 percent more engaged with Trump than they were with Barack Obama at his peak in 2008. On its face, this engagement indicates support of candidacy.
"If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest," Rai explained to CNBC.
However, the AI does not take into account the tone or intention of the user activity it measures. So if someone is posting negative reactions to Trump on Twitter, for example, the AI registers it as as simply "engagement," which it considers a positive measurement.
"Granularity of data will determine progressively lesser bias despite the weightage of negative or positive conversations," Rai wrote.
In other words, more precise data would allow MogAI to separate out a candidate's supporters from their naysayers. Obtaining users' IP addresses, for example, would allow the AI system to track their overall engagement more precisely.
There are other potential loopholes as well, Rai admits. There are more people engaging on social media now than there were in 2008, for example. Still, as Trump has often demonstrated, any publicity can be good publicity.
"If you look at the primaries, in the primaries, there were immense amount of negative conversations that happen with regards to Trump," Rai told CNBC. "However, when these conversations started picking up pace, in the final days, it meant a huge game opening for Trump and he won the Primaries with a good margin."
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