An Objective-Based Entropy Approach for Interpretable Decision Tree Models in Support of Human Resource Management: The Case of Absenteeism at Work

Abstract

The negative impact of absenteeism on organizations’ productivity and profitability is well established. To decrease absenteeism, it is imperative to understand its underlying causes and to identify susceptible employee subgroups. Most research studies apply hypotheses testing and regression models to identify features that are correlated with absenteeism—typically, these models are limited to finding simple correlations. We illustrate the use of interpretable classification algorithms for uncovering subgroups of employees with common characteristics and a similar level of absenteeism. This process may assist human resource managers in understanding the underlying reasons for absenteeism, which, in turn, could stimulate measures to decrease it. Our proposed methodology makes use of an objective-based information gain measure in conjunction with an ordinal CART model. Our results indicate that the ordinal CART model outperforms conventional classifiers and, more importantly, identifies patterns in the data that have not been revealed by other models. We demonstrate the importance of interpretability for human resource management through three examples. The main contributions of this research are (1) the development of an information-based ordinal classifier for a published absenteeism dataset and (2) the illustration of an interpretable approach that could be of considerable value in supporting human resource management decision-making.