Dynamic Bayesian analysis for irregularly and incompletely observed contingency tables

Abstract

Pre-election surveys are usually conducted several times to forecast election results before the actual voting. It is common that each survey includes a substantial number of non-responses and that the successive survey results are seen as a stochastic multinomial time series evolving over time. We propose a dynamic Bayesian model to examine how multinomial time series evolve over time for the irregularly observed contingency tables and to determine how sensitively the dynamic structure reacts to an unexpected event, such as a candidate scandal. Further, we test whether non-responses are non-ignorable to determine if non-responses need to be imputed for better forecast. We also suggest a Bayesian method that overcomes the boundary solution problem and show that the proposed method outperforms the previous Bayesian methods. Our dynamic Bayesian model is applied to the two pre-election surveys for the 2007 Korea presidential candidate election and for the 1998 Ohio general election. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Korean Statistical Society. All rights reserved.