audit draft · estimand audit

Estimand audit: Problem 13's incidents, traced to their arrays

2026-10-07 · offline instrument and report, for human review. No model was called, no published result was recomputed, and no rule is adopted here. The tracer runs the E-002b and E-002c runners' analyse() on synthetic draws and records which array produced each interval and p-value that the shared inference helpers return. Its tests include the three incidents Problem 13 names, run from the revisions that carried them.

Why a results file cannot show the defect

Problem 13 records three claims whose interval and p-value came from different quantities. A results file holds the numbers, not the arrays behind them, and the defect does not always show in the numbers. A CI that excludes zero beside a large p was the symptom in E-002b's H4. E-002c's H3 was coherent on its face: both of its numbers said "supported", and they measured different things.

So the binding has to be made where the numbers are computed. The tracer replaces the shared bootstrap_ci, permutation_diff and paired_permutation in a runner's namespace with wrappers that keep each call's inputs and returned objects. Each effect's ci95 and p_value are then bound to the call that produced them by object identity: they are the very float objects a wrapped call returned, so the binding is exact and changes no value. A number no wrapped call returned — one computed inline — stays unbound and is reported as such.

R1, R1b and R2 are properties of which arrays the code passes where, so one synthetic draw exercises them. R4 is not. Whether a record and a summary disagree depends on where a draw falls relative to their two decision rules, so R4 executes each runner's main() — with run() replaced by the traced result and --out pointed at a temporary directory — over forty synthetic draws, and a FAIL names the first that shows it. The tests check both that each summary reported writing inside its temporary directory and that the whole tree, ignored files included, is unchanged afterwards.

Each incident, red on its revision and green on its fix

Each red result must carry its own code, so a catch-all branch cannot stand in for the detector the incident needs. The historical runners are loaded from git and run against the current metrics library. The H3 fixture uses cea9243 rather than the runner's first revision, because both of that runner's first two revisions carry the H3 and summary defects together and only the 549ff54 → cea9243 pair isolates the summary.

What it reports on the runners as they stand

Two more instances of E-002b H4's shape. E-002b's registered H3 and E-002c's recorded_conditional_asymmetry build their interval from paired over-minus-under differences and test with an unpaired two-sample permutation of the same pairs: R2 FAIL:unpaired-test-of-paired-differences. Both concatenate sender and receiver, so each runs over two values per brief: 32 for E-002b's 16 briefs, 48 for E-002c's 24. Their published verdicts are not changed by anything here. E-002b H3's unpaired p is already 1/10 001, the smallest a 10 000-permutation test can return, so a paired test on the same draws could not give a smaller one; whether it would give a larger one is not computed.

A record and a summary that can disagree. In both runners most registered hypotheses' supported is decided by the interval alone — E-002c's H3, whose verdict is its corrected test, is the exception — while the terminal summary marks a hypothesis that carries a p-value only if its Holm-corrected p is also below 0.05. On a draw where the interval excludes zero and the corrected p does not reach 0.05, the record says supported and the summary says nothing. R4 finds that for E-002b's H2 and E-002c's H4, first at synthetic seed 9. It is E-002c H1's defect class, reached through a different rule. No published record of the present runners lands in that region. The first E-002b results file did — H4 at supported: true beside significant_at_005: false — and that is Problem 13's first incident.

A one-sample question asked with a two-sample test. E-002b H1 and H2, and E-002c's H4 and recorded_bias_positive, test "mean above zero" by permuting the values against a vector of zeros. That is reported as its own class rather than as a pairing defect, because the interval and the test do use one array. Whether that test answers the registered question is not decided here.

Untraced intervals. Seven of the fifteen effects' intervals are computed inline: E-002b's H5, whose p-value is inline too, and E-002c's beta_pooled, beta_sender, beta_receiver, H1, H2 and H3. Four of the nine registered hypotheses are among them, E-002c's primary H1 included. R3 reports them as untraced. An inline estimator can be correct, and this tool cannot see inside one.

A label, not an estimate. E-002c's results file records H3's sum_of_contributions as 0.012489 beside a value of 0.299731. The ratio is 24.0, the number of briefs: the field holds the mean paired_permutation returns, under the name of the sum. FINDINGS checks the sum by hand and gets it right; the record mislabels its own estimand, which is the Problem 13 class at the level of a field name.

What it does not establish

• Synthetic draws exercise code paths, not published numbers. A FAIL says the runner computes an interval and a test from different structures, or that its record and summary can part. It does not say a published verdict is wrong, and none is recomputed here.
• Two runners. The E-001 family computes its statistics locally. E-001b and E-001c use bootstrap_effect_ci, permutation_main_effect and a local holm_adjust; E-001 has its own permutation_test and bootstrap_ci and no Holm step. None is in the tracer's reach. E-001c is the one experiment whose pre-registration registers a same-array rule.
• Only what the shared helpers return is bound. A number computed inline, or through a helper reached by another name, is reported as untraced.
• Not a gate. It reports FAILs on registered hypotheses at HEAD, before anyone has decided what a registration should require. A check that turns current work red on rules nobody chose teaches its reader to ignore it. The tool is not in the pre-push list.

Decisions this leaves for the owner of the analysis plans

1. Which relation a registration requires. E-001c's pre-registration (section 6, item 6) asks that effect, interval and p-value come from the same array. Corrected E-002c H3 fails that, and legitimately so: its interval bootstraps briefs jointly and its test sign-flips per-brief contributions. R1 accepts it. One of the two is the rule.
2. Whether two party values per brief satisfy "brief-level". E-002b's pre-registration says "permutation test over briefs" for H3. E-002b's H2 and H3 pool sender and receiver into 32 units for 16 briefs, and E-002c's H4 into 48 for 24.
3. Which verdict the record and the summary carry when interval and corrected p disagree. At present they carry different ones.
4. Whether the R2 findings need addenda in their FINDINGS, under the rule that results files are never rewritten.
5. Whether a future runner must pass this audit before its registration is committed, which is the point at which fixing it costs nothing.

Reproduce

python3 tools/test_audit_estimand.py
python3 tools/audit_estimand.py --fixtures
python3 tools/audit_estimand.py
python3 tools/audit_estimand.py --check-record research/estimand-audit.json

The counts this note states are read back from the saved record by tools/check_counts.py; the last command recomputes that record and fails if it no longer matches.

Exposure. Written by claude-opus-5-5. It read both runners in full, including their composition and framing prompt templates, and five historical revisions of them. It read E-002b's pre-registration §5 items 3–6, E-001c's §6 items 4–7, E-002c's FINDINGS lines 160–180 and the H3 entry of its last results file, and Problem 13 in full. E-002c's hypotheses it knows from that runner's comments and from scouting agents' summaries; it did not open E-002c's pre-registration. Of the E-001 runners it read only their statistics functions' names. No probe item, key or brief text was opened. See EXPOSURE.md.

Prose: CC BY 4.0. Code: Apache-2.0.

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