Evaluating and Predicting Contract Performance Using Machine Learning: A Feasibility Study

Abstract

The Office of Acquisition Analytics and Policy, which is part of Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD(A and S)), tasked the Institute for Defense Analyses with assessing the feasibility of using text analytics and machine learning to evaluate contracts and predict program performance. Although the machine-learning algorithms we evaluated could not predict program performance using the metrics we applied to the contracts, we were able to use text analytics to extract useful information from these contracts and similar documents. This report describes machine-learning algorithms that are feasible for exploratory and descriptive contract analysis. However, further research is necessary to establish whether it is reasonable to use this information, with additional data sources, to predict program performance.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2020
Accession Number
AD1121596

Entities

People

  • Brian G. Gladstone
  • Gregory A. Davis
  • Laura A. Hildreth
  • Miranda G. Seitz-mcleese
  • Travis L. Depriest

Organizations

  • Institute for Defense Analyses

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Computer Languages
  • Contracts
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Mining
  • Data Processing
  • Data Science
  • Data Sets
  • Data Visualization
  • Feasibility Studies
  • Human Systems Integration
  • Information Science
  • Literature Surveys
  • Machine Learning
  • Military Acquisition
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Procurement
  • Supervised Machine Learning
  • Text Analytics
  • Text Mining

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Neural Networks