U.S. Army Reserve Retention Modeling For Mid-Level Leaders

The Army Reserve wants to retain more mid-level leaders (defined as E6-E7 and O3-O4). In order to do this, the Reserve would like to know what influences a service member to stay or leave the Reserve military. Retaining mid-level leaders will greatly reduce the monetary costs of attrition, but will also increase readiness across the Army Reserve. This problem is constantly being evaluated by Human Resources Command and U.S. Army Recruiting Command; however, a new model consisting of multi-dimensional personnel data may provide new insight on what factors are predictive of a service member staying in the Army Reserve and may also provide insight on what programs are most effective at affecting retention. Once the model was created using logistic regression, it was evaluated using a test set to see how effective the model was at prediction as well as evaluate how influential each predictor was in forecasting retention of a service member.