Publisher's Synopsis
RAND Project Air Force was tasked with developing a new capability for planners: a retention early warning system (REWS) that alerts policymakers when a subgroup of U.S. Air Force (USAF) military members is at risk for future shortages. The goal of the research project was to develop a forecasting model for retention, operationalized within a prototype decision-support application, that can alert decisionmakers to emerging problems and thus allow them enough time to consider adjusting accession and retention policies before shortages occur. The authors' overall approach to designing the system drew on widely used paradigms for solving data science problems. These paradigms emphasize understanding the business problem, drawing on a wide array of data sources and types, testing several flexible prediction approaches to optimize performance, and operationalizing the information for decisionmaking. To gain an understanding of the data sourc
