Can machine learning be used to forecast the future uncertainty of military teams?

Uncertainty is a fundamental property of neural computation that becomes amplified when sensory information does not match a person’s expectations of the world. Uncertainty and hesitation are often early indicators of potential disruption, and the ability to rapidly measure uncertainty would have implications for future educational and training efforts by targeting reflective discussions about past actions, supporting in-progress corrections, and generating forecasts about future disruptions.

An approach is described combining neurodynamics and machine learning to provide quantitative measures of uncertainty. Models of neurodynamic information derived from electroencephalogram (EEG) brainwaves have provided detailed neurodynamic histories of US Navy submarine navigation team members. Persistent periods (25–30 s) of neurodynamic information were seen as discrete peaks when establishing the submarine’s position and were identified as periods of uncertainty by an artificial intelligence (AI) system previously trained to recognize the frequency, magnitude, and duration of different patterns of uncertainty in healthcare and student teams. Transition matrices of neural network states closely predicted the future uncertainty of the navigation team during the three minutes prior to a grounding event.

These studies suggest that the dynamics of uncertainty may have common characteristics across teams and tasks and that forecasts of their short-term evolution can be estimated.