How Will My Senator Vote ? Ike Okonkwo (@ikeondata) Zipfian Academy 4.3.14

How Will My Senator Vote ? • Built a system to model congressional voting patterns over the past 3.5 years • GOAL : Predict how senators will vote on future legislation • Predict which legislation will be passed in the US senate • Characterize senators using only publicly available information (vote record, bill summary, tweets, wikipedia pages)

Motivation • Correctly predicted results in 50 of 50 states • Correctly predicted results in 31 of 33 senate races

Pipeline Multi Dimensional Feature Scaling Clustering Naive Bayes Random Forest Logistic Regression SVM KNN AdaBoost US Senate Website Tweets Wikipedia Page Chi-Square Pre - Classifier NLP Predictions Data Ingestion Exploratory Analysis Modeling Feedback

Analysis : How do Senators cluster ?

Results - iteration 1 of 2, Avg Accuracy : 63.5%

Results - iteration 2 of 2, Avg Accuracy : 66.1%

Use Cases • H.R.61 / H.R.217 - Planned Parenthood defunding bills • About a third of their funding comes from government grants and contracts Product could be useful to non-profits to help them channel their lobbying efforts effectively

Next Steps / Questions • Explore Topic Modeling (LDA) and Deep Learning • Explore association rules between senators • Do Committee assignments affect how senators vote ? • Do PAC and Campaigns donations affect how senators vote ?

No content

Analysis : How do Senators cluster (Nominations)

Analysis : How do Senators cluster (Bill Passage)