[roenxi]

Ah. Sorry, silly me. A quick search suggests 20 weeks, so ~4.5 months.

Obviously I don't have much specific insight, so maybe there is a culture where they don't use leave entitlements. But if there are indicators that identify a sub-population taking a potentially 20 week contiguous break it is entirely plausible that it would turn up as a statistically significant effect in an objective performance measure. All else being equal, then a machine learning model could pick up on that.

The point isn't that it is the be-all and end all, just that the model might be picking up on something real. There are actual differences in the physical world.