Timeseries Analysis and Forecasting

USCIS is the component within DHS that oversees lawful immigration to the United States. That means USCIS receives, processes, and maintains all applications for admission for Lawful permanent residents (LPRs), or adjustments to LPR status. Also known as “green card” holders, LPRs are non-citizens who are lawfully authorized to live permanently within the United States and are required to fill out Form I-90, Application to Replace Permanent Resident Card (Green Card). Since there has been a considerable influx of green card applications, USCIS used a combination of exploratory data analysis to determine the most used categories for applicants submitting I-90s and machine learning to create predictions of workloads. As a follow-on, USCIS used Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models on the I-90 form, which allowed the prediction of the total number of forms for a 2-year period. ARIMA is one of the easiest and effective machine learning algorithms to perform time series forecasting. This capability has been deployed in production for more than a year. This model was eventually enhanced using ML model to have better reusability and performance.