AI Analysis Predicted Trump Win Throughout Election

Figaro Digital – Havas Cognitive was commissioned by ITV news to create an AI bot to predict the outcome of the presidential election. Using the technology of IBM Watson, Havas Cognitive created Eagle AI to analyze and understand the attitudinal responses surrounding the two candidates throughout the campaign. It gathered data from the debates, campaign speeches, press and social media from the time of the conventions to election day. While most pollsters predicted a Clinton victory, Eagle AI never did. It had Trump winning from the very beginning.

The Havas team trained the bot to understand emotion, sentiment and tone to analyze the attitudinal responses of voters. This removed any human bias the pollsters might have and also let the AI see the emotion underneath, something a simple question regarding the election cannot answer. That being said, the Eagle AI did predict a Trump win by a much wider margin and did predict 9 states incorrectly. However, it did guess 4/5 out of swing states correctly for Trump, where many polling experts thought Clinton had the edge. But maybe using this kind of cognitive computing can help pollsters make better predictions in the future. The data the bot processed in the last month of the election alone would have taken 2,000 researchers 30 years to do the same analysis. LINK