Vaithianathan’s team developed a predictive model using 132 variables—including length of time on public benefits, past involvement with the child welfare system, mother’s age, whether or not the child was born to a single parent, mental health, and correctional history—to rate the maltreatment risk of children in the MSD’s historical data. They found that their algorithm could predict with “fair, approaching good” accuracy whether these children would have a “substantiated finding of maltreatment” by the time they turned five.
