A Bayesian Approach to Predicting Disengaged Youth

This article presents a Bayesian approach for predicting and identifying the factors which most influence an individual's propensity to fall into the category of Not in Employment Education or Training (NEET). The approach partitions the covariates into two groups: those which have the potential to be changed as a result of an intervention strategy and those which must be controlled for. This partition allows us to develop models and identify important factors conditional on the control covariates, which is useful for clinicians and policy makers who wish to identify potential intervention strategies. Using the data obtained by O'Dea (2014) we compare the results from this approach with the results from O'Dea (2014) and with the results obtained using the Bayesian variable selection procedure of Lamnisos (2009) when the covariates are not partitioned. We find that the relative importance of predictive factors varies greatly depending upon the control covariates. This has enormous implications when deciding on what interventions are most useful to prevent young people from being NEET.