About The Virtual Tout

At a racetrack, a tout is a person who collects information about racing stables and horses and gives tips to betters. A tout has special knowledge that others lack.

During the summer of 2007, Tom Miller traced the progress of Major League Baseball teams leading up to the World Series between the Colorado Rockies and the Boston Red Sox. His book Without a Tout: How to Pick a Winning Team, published the following year, provided a practical, no-nonsense guide to building models for team sports. And the initial offering of The Virtual Tout® comprised an automated sports information service.

In August 2020, The Virtual Tout® moved from sporting event forecasting to political event forecasting. Drawing on betting data from prediction markets hosted by PredictIt, The Virtual Tout® correctly predicted the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. See The Virtual Tout® Archive and In the Media.

Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, Tom Miller invented prediction surveys, methods used to correctly predict results in the two Georgia senatorial runoff elections in January 2021.

Tom Miller is the person behind The Virtual Tout®. He is faculty director of the graduate data science program at Northwestern University. Tom holds a doctorate in psychometrics and master’s degree in statistics from the University of Minnesota, as well as master’s degrees in economics and business from the University of Oregon.

Tom Miller owns Research Publishers LLC and is editor-in-chief of a new journal, Data Science Quarterly. He has written numerous books and articles about data science, research methods, and information services. His resume is available online from LinkedIn or as a pdf file.

The Virtual Tout® today offers technologies and services for predicting future events. It is the home of prediction surveys.

Go to the home page of The Virtual Tout.