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by mthoms 2051 days ago
This is really useful. Nice work.

The description for the "Block trend" column could perhaps be a little clearer. It currently reads:

>How has the trailing candidate's share of recent blocks trended? Computed using a moving average of previous 30k or more votes (or as many as available).

To me that says "We compute the moving average using the last 30k votes, except when we use more or less than that.".

1 comments

To me it reads “We aim for 30k but take what we can get.” You can see that the update sizes from the nytimes source vary greatly.
That's over-simplifying by leaving out the "or more" part (which presumably exists because they only want to count full blocks). I do understand the gist of what they are saying but there's got to be a better way to word it.

I also wonder if theres a good statistical reason for only counting full blocks. Why not just stop at 30k?

probably dont have access to individual vote data?
Right, but you could use a fraction of the final block (using the known vote percentages for that block). Then it would be "a moving average of the last 30k votes" and not "a moving average of the last 30k or more votes".
yea that’s a good point. make a pull request!

though for me just wanting a rough idea of what’s rolling in vs what’s needed it’s sufficient enough.