Measuring and Forecasting Presidential Approval from Online Data

I recently published a paper on SSRN about a special kind of time-series model — a Generalized Autoregressive Dirichlet Multinomial Model. The origin of this mouthful was an interest in creating efficient forecasting functions for responses to multiple-choice single-answer questions, of the sort we frequently ask in consumer surveys.

Questions such as: Do you like brand X, brand Y, something else, or you don’t know? Or, in my world: are you employed, unemployed and looking for work, unemployed but not looking for work…