A MIXTURE OF EXPERTS MODEL FOR RANK DATA WITH APPLICATIONS IN ELECTION STUDIES

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gormley, Isobel Claire; Murphy, Thomas Brendan
• 署名单位: University College Dublin
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1932-6157
• DOI: 10.1214/08-AOAS178
• 发表日期: 2008
• 页码: 1452-1477
• 关键词: hierarchical mixtures; maximum-likelihood; inference; selection

摘要

A voting bloc is defined to be a group of voters who have similar voting preferences. The cleavage of the Irish electorate into voting blocs is of interest. Irish elections employ a single transferable vote electoral systems under this system voters rank some or all of the electoral candidates in order of preference. These rank votes provide a rich source of preference information from which inferences about the composition of the electorate may be drawn. Additionally, the influence of social factors or covariates on the electorate composition is of interest. A mixture of experts model is a mixture model in which the model parameters are functions of covariates. A mixture of experts model for rank data is developed to provide a model-based method to cluster Irish voters into voting blocs, to examine the influence of social factors on this clustering and to examine the characteristic preferences of the voting blocs. The Benter model for rank data is employed as the family of component densities within the mixture of experts model; generalized linear model theory is employed to model the influence of covariates oil the mixing proportions. Model fitting is achieved via a hybrid of the EM and MM algorithms. An example of the methodology is illustrated by examining all Irish presidential election. The existence of voting blocs in the electorate is established and it is determined that age and government satisfaction levels are important factors influencing voting in this election.