Bastidores das eleições

Não dêem muita importância aos debates presidenciais nos EUA. As pessoas que vão fazer a diferença e eleger Hillary Clinton para a presidência não ligam ao debate. Informem-se acerca da sofisticação da equipa analítica de Obama nas eleições de 2012 e imaginem o que isto não será quatro anos depois. É mesmo "data analysis on steroids!"

You may have heard how statistical wizard Nate Silver predicted the electoral votes for each state in the 2012 presidential election, showing that raw data crunching of polls is much more reliable than traditional punditry. What you probably haven't heard is how the Obama campaign built a 100-strong analytics staff to churn through dozens of terabytes of data with a combination of the HP Vertica MPP (massively parallel processing) analytic database and predictive models with R and Stata to gain a competitive edge.

Credit for the big data approach goes to Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who decided to dive headfirst into an analytics-driven campaign. Messina commented, "We were going to demand data on everything, we were going to measure everything... we were going to put an analytics team inside of us to study us the entire time to make sure we were being smart about things." To ensure everything was measured, staff were evaluated on whether they entered data. The mantra became: "If you didn't enter the data, you didn't do the work."

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