Selected Marine Corps Reserve Personnel Status Forecasting

Select Marine Corp Reserve is a reserve component of the United States Marine Corps currently composed of approximately 32,000 Marines participating in weekend drills and active duty training, or activated for service. The retention and recruiting missions of this organization require an accurate population forecast with properly fit prediction intervals. We use decision trees to estimate the future population and variance of a cohort from individual personnel records. Our algorithm provides useful forecasts and prediction intervals up to 12 months into the future. Despite the success of the algorithm, seasonality remains an issue. We recommend further study to remove seasonality from this algorithm.