22 - Big Data and Bold Calls: How INVOKE Saw What Everyone Missed

Summary

INTRODUCTION

INVOKE Malaysia remains the only organization in the world to have correctly predicted Malaysia's 14th General Elections (GE-14). All other research houses and political scientists pointed to a comfortable or narrow victory for the incumbent, Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition (Zurairi 2018). Only INVOKE maintained its prediction—since January 2017—of a historic Pakatan Harapan (PH) victory.

Malaysian research houses like Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, Kajidata Research (Malay Mail Online, 4 May 2018), and Ilham Centre (Kaur 2018), as well as political analysts from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Sains Malaysia, had all predicted a comfortable BN victory (The Sun Daily, 14 February 2018). Merdeka Center and political analysts even floated the possibility of BN regaining a two-thirds majority in Parliament (The Sun Daily, 7 May 2018). Prominent international research houses and news sites like FT Research (Malaysiakini, 19 April 2018), Oxford Economics (NST Business, 11 April 2018), the Economist Intelligence Unit (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018), Reuters (Sipalan and Menon 2018), CIMB Investment Bank Research (Ridzwan 2018), HSBC Global Research (Incalcaterra et al. 2018), Hong Leong Investment Bank Research (NST Business, 9 April 2018), Maybank Investment Bank Research (Zarina Zakariah 2018) similarly predicted a BN victory.

The reason for these discrepancies could be attributed to the methods used for prediction. Quantitatively, only INVOKE managed to use Big Data analytics for its prediction to construct a more accurate representation of voters’ inclinations across the country. The process of installing a Big Data warehouse with the necessary tools, talents and expertise is expensive and prohibitive for many research institutions.

Qualitatively, an observer's perspective of the Malaysian political climate is limited by Najib Razak's government that masked the true political and economic sentiment of the masses. His government ensured that the local and international media were constantly showered with positive economic numbers to indicate that the country was doing well. Due to the intrinsic connection between economic and political stability in Malaysia, many political observers had taken the marvellous economic numbers as an indicator that the government was still strong.

Malaysia's GDP growth numbers witnessed a dramatic increase from 4.2 per cent in 2016 to 5.9 per cent in 2017. This GDP number was also higher than the 5.0 per cent figure that was recorded in 2015.