Posted: April 6th, 2016

Provide a brief explanation of how you would use the sample to come up with the requested prediction of the referendum vote. Briefly discuss what causes uncertainty about the prediction of the referendum outcome.

The UK will have a referendum on whether to remain part of the EU or to leave. Given the disastrous failure of the polling companies during the last general election, you have been asked to take over this role. For this purpose 999 UK voters registered to vote in the referendum have been randomly chosen and asked about their likely choice. Their vote has been recorded in the data set ‘vote.xls’. A value of 0 means they will vote to remain, and a value of 1 means they will vote to leave. Some voters are undecided; their entry is denoted with an X.
Detailed instructions:
a) Provide a brief explanation of how you would use the sample to come up with the requested prediction of the referendum vote. Briefly discuss what causes uncertainty about the prediction of the referendum outcome. (20 marks)
b) Using the sample provided suggest an unbiased estimator and use it to provide a prediction of the likely outcome of the referendum vote. Be explicit about how you deal with undecided voters. (25 marks)
c) You are also interested in understanding what happens with undecided voters. Come up with a way of providing bounded estimates for the referendum vote for extreme swings of the undecided voters. (25 marks)
d) Test a hypothesis at the 5% level of significance that there will be majority to remain. Assume that a margin of .52 will provide a save majority in the referendum. (30 marks)