Polling Simulator

This is a lightweight Python tool for simulating political polls, based on my understanding of how pollsters handle real data. It comes with several methods for sampling electorates and aggregating polling data built-in, but is designed in a way to easily allow for customization as necessary.

Installation

Note: currently the only documented way to install this tool is by cloning the repo and installing an environment via conda. It is, however, written as a Python package, so making it pip-installable via GitHub/PyPI would not be a heavy lift. If you'd like to see that, please feel free to post an issue on the repo (or better yet, make a pull request); if there's enough interest I'm happy to consider doing it.

Assumptions:

• You are using a Linux-like OS (e.g. Ubuntu, Mac OSX)
• You are familiar with the command line
• You have conda installed

$ git clone https://github.com/AndrewRook/polling_simulator.git
$ cd polling_simulator
$ conda env create -f environment.yml
$ conda activate polling_simulator

Usage:

For usage examples, check out the notebooks in this repository, and see my blog series starting with this post. There are also docstrings for core functions if you want general guidance.