Why is a case predicted as "Likely to escalate" when it is in Waiting on customer status?

An agent response usually makes it less likely for a case to escalate, but for some cases, there are too many other negative factors that outweigh one response from an agent and hence if the status is set as "Waiting On Customer" manually after sending an outbound message, it could still be predicted as Likely To Escalate. Our Likely to Escalate predictions consider all Open cases within the time frame of 12 hours to 30 days of case creation to be predicted and do not restrict them based on case status. 

Many factors go into the calculation of Likely To Escalate prediction and not a case status. Because we track the last outbound message and weigh it appropriately along with other factors in our Likely To escalate predictions, the possibility of such cases being predicted will go down but if the weightage of other factors continues to increase, even if the last case activity is an Outbound message.