The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services is ending a high-profile program that used computer data mining to identify children at risk for serious injury or death after the agency's top official called the technology unreliable.
"We are not doing the predictive analytics because it didn't seem to be predicting much," DCFS Director Beverly "B.J." Walker told the Tribune.
The $366,000 Rapid Safety Feedback program was central to reforms promised by Walker's predecessor, George Sheldon, who took office in 2015 following a series of child deaths and other problems.
Two Florida firms — the nonprofit Eckerd Connects and its for-profit partner, Mindshare Technology — mined electronic DCFS files and assigned a score of 1 to 100 to children who were the subject of an abuse allegation to the agency hotline. The algorithms rated the children's risk of being killed or severely injured during the next two years, according to DCFS public statements.
[For more of this story, written by David Jackson and Gary Marx, go to http://www.chicagotribune.com/...-20171206-story.html]
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