3 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
builtbykev 6b17f79367 Per-archetype re-audit: no slot reaches 500, and the replication unit
decided everything

The premise does not hold. prove-hit-factors.js has no date filter
anywhere in it and pages the full table -- there was never a window to
widen. Full clean history is 1,266 rows, not 2,715. platoon was not
"proved" last session, it was explicitly held on 4.5%-median-contaminated
season-to-date splits, and pitcher_contact_profile was demoted. The
proven set going in was one factor, not three.

STEP 1: no archetype slot reaches n>=500 on full history. Best is BOMBER
at 408, and BOMBER is the most common archetype on the board. GHOST 173,
BRUSH 64, DRIVER 43, CATALYST 16. These are confirmed genuinely short,
not artifacts.

STEP 2 is where the real finding is. park_hits initially PROVED at 619
rows across 45 games -- but those games only ever visited 14 distinct
park values. A park effect is replicated across parks, and unmodelled
park heterogeneity is confounded with the thing being estimated. Each
factor is now clustered on the coarser of the game and the entity its
treatment rides on.

That flipped two verdicts and confirms Kev's causal-correctness thesis
from a new direction: defense_by_direction has 442 hitter-team units of
replication where crude team defense has 26. The correct atom is not just
more accurate, it is the only one measurable at all. park_hits (14) and
defense (26) can never be validated however long the ledger runs -- the
same ceiling as park dimensions, reached independently.

Also fixed a bar I got wrong last session: I transplanted the 500-row
floor onto clusters, which refused a factor with 1,059 rows over 85 games
while answering neither question. Two floors now -- rows>=500 for a stable
estimate, clusters>=40 for a trustworthy interval. Not a lowered bar:
park_hits and defense are still refused.

PROVEN: defense_by_direction only, pooled, [-0.0054,-0.0012] at 99 tests.
It stays POOLED-ONLY -- no per-archetype reasoning wired, nothing
grandfathered. The card must not say "GHOST: defence matchup strong"
because we have not earned that sentence. The predicted fingerprint did
not appear either: BOMBER -0.0036 vs GHOST -0.0024, the opposite
direction, both noise-dominated. Recorded so it is not claimed later.

RESCALE: NOT READY. One proven factor worth -0.0031 Brier. Rescaling on
that is relabelling.

Counter and frozen clusters byte-identical.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01W1sivYNqY2TS5ftykmHBU9
2026-08-05 19:58:37 -04:00
builtbykev 7b85934dc3 Under-querying vs out of data: the answer depends on the unit
The platoon test's n=452 described how much of the JOIN survived, not how
much data exists. There are 1,266 clean settled hits rows and zero
quarantined ones. platoon_splits had been ingested from tonight's lineups
only (315 players), so any hitter who settled a prop without appearing in
an ingest-day lineup was silently absent from every test.

Backfilled all 380 hitters (81 fetched, 0 unresolved). Re-ran on 1,059
rows, up from 452.

THE DEMOTION IS THE HEADLINE. pitcher_contact_profile, the strongest
proven factor in the programme (-0.0064, CI [-0.0113,-0.0014]), roughly
halved to -0.0034 on more than double the sample and its corrected
interval now spans zero. The Bonferroni denominator also rose to 55,
which widens every interval -- but a denominator cannot move a point
estimate, and that halved on its own.

platoon and platoon_severity now clear the bar and are NOT promoted.
Upper bound -0.0001, on season-to-date splits that contain the games they
predict: measured contamination is 4.5% median, 12.4% at p90, 137% worst.
I had assumed ~1%. They stay CANDIDATE pending point-in-time splits.

GAME-LEVEL IS A DIFFERENT PROBLEM. game_context held zero weather rows
ever -- not because the fetcher was wrong (it correctly targets
Open-Meteo's archive) but because ledger_entries keys a game as
mlb:2026-08-03:Away@Home and game_context keys it as mlb:823437. Every
lookup missed and NULL columns read as honest absence. Third occurrence
of that class.

Fixed the join: 96/101 settled games now carry actual archived weather,
park dimensions backfilled 15 -> 30 venues.

But 928 total_bases rows sit on 47 games at 17.6 rows per game. Park and
weather assign one value per game, so resampling rows would have
manufactured a pass. factorGate now resamples clusters when rows carry
one and judges sample against effective_n; unclustered rows keep the
original path byte-for-byte. Verdict: 47 clusters < 500, and the point
estimate is +0.0011 -- worse, not merely unproven.

Weather needs ~57 more days. Park dimensions need never: there are 30
ballparks in MLB, so a venue-constant factor can never reach 500
independent units. That bar was built for player-level factors and does
not transfer.

Wind is refused. We have speed and bearing for all 96 games; we lack park
orientation, and 220 degrees is blowing out at one park and in at
another. Using speed alone would assert an effect while discarding the
sign that decides what it is.

Counter and frozen clusters untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01W1sivYNqY2TS5ftykmHBU9
2026-08-05 19:30:17 -04:00
builtbykev a9ee55550b Build the two-part factor gate: one factor proves, and zero are theatre
The question was whether the hit grade reads tonight's game or just says he is
due. Answering it needed a gate that correlation cannot provide, because
correlation cannot separate the two ways a factor looks alive: it reads the
game, or it moves the number and reads nothing. The second is what a product
ships by accident -- arch-v1 moved 76% of rows by 2.5 points, changed
resolution by 0.0000, and was live for months, and no user could have told.

So a factor must now clear both conditions: move the prediction off the
player's own leave-one-out base rate, AND improve out-of-sample Brier. Brier
rather than correlation, because correlation asks whether the ordering improved
and this asks whether the NUMBER got closer to what happened -- and for a graded
probability the number is the product.

The correction applies to the interval itself, which turned out to matter more
than expected. A plain 95% CI is the right bar for one test; at fifty
cumulative tests roughly two or three intervals exclude zero by chance alone.
Widening to 1 - 0.05/tests, currently 99.9%, flipped both defence and platoon
out of "proves". A 95% interval would have shipped two unproven factors into
the grade, with reasoning text explaining them to users.

That forced a distinction I had initially collapsed. Defence and platoon have
FAVOURABLE point estimates whose corrected intervals merely span zero, and
calling that THEATER would repeat the error this codebase keeps correcting:
insufficient evidence is not evidence of absence. THEATER is now reserved for
its one real meaning -- moves the number, reads nothing -- and
NOT_PROVEN_AT_CORRECTED_BAR names a real candidate held to a bar that rises with
every hypothesis the programme tests.

Result on 741 settled hits rows: pitcher_contact_profile PROVES, improving
Brier by 0.0066 with a 99.9% interval of [-0.0114, -0.0016]. Defence (-0.0043)
and platoon (-0.0039) are not proven at the corrected bar. Park is
sample-blocked at n=405. Zero factors are theatre, which is the genuinely good
news: nothing decorative is being wired. Per-archetype every slot is
sample-blocked (BOMBER 252-294, GHOST 67-125).

Two spec gaps worth recording. The approach identities the order names -- SPRAY,
DAMAGE-DEALER, COUNT-WORKER -- do not exist in the registry; the MLB batter
archetypes are BOMBER, GHOST, TORCH, BRUSH, DRIVER, FLEX, ALPHA, HYBRID and
CATALYST. And parkFactors maps hits to run_base, so there is no hits-specific
park factor at all: a park that turns outs into hits without producing runs is
invisible to the input we have.

The grade rescale is NOT run. It was explicitly gated on the factor proving,
and one pooled factor worth 0.0066 of Brier is not a factor-informed
distribution -- rescaling on it would dress a base-rate model as a matchup
model, which is the exact thing this gate was built to prevent.

4,286 tests green (340 suites); web build exit 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01W1sivYNqY2TS5ftykmHBU9
2026-08-04 19:30:18 -04:00