Summary: Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction.
Choice Reviews
This lively, informative, multivalent romp through the history of data accumulation and its uses, leading to today's refined ability to predict the outcome of a future event with considerable accuracy, appeared in the closing months of the 2012 presidential election campaign. During the campaign, statistician/blogger Silver (The New York Times FiveThirtyEight ), in articles and interviews, proffered increasingly confident opinions about its outcome, opinions at odds with those of most of the pundits, poll takers, and statisticians examining the same data. His vindication by the actual results of the election lends his book that much more interest. Though it does not trace new ground, its auspicious message is, in an era of bigger and bigger "Big Data," that it is possible, with objective judgment and sophisticated statistical tools, to make ever more reliable predictions on which the future of the species and the security of the country may depend. Silver pays particular homage to the well-known Bayes's theorem as fundamental to the proper application of statistical theory to actual situations. Individual chapters deal with the 2008 financial meltdown, earthquakes, baseball, chess, poker, the weather, climate change, and terrorism. Abundant endnotes and references. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and general audiences, all levels. General Readers; Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. M. Schiff CUNY College of Staten Island Copyright 2013 American Library Association.
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