Validation
Philosophy
Validation is the reason the platform exists. Every layer has its own gates,
and a failure at any gate is terminal for that candidate — no averaging,
no "close enough".
The gate chain
| Layer | Gates |
|---|---|
| Dataset | quality gates, fingerprinting, provenance |
| Features | schema hash, dimension, bounds, ordering |
| Model | 10-gate load gate, calibration, min-evidence |
| Research | purge/embargo walk-forward, OOS floors, robustness stress |
| Governance | 14-gate candidate verification, promotion preview + transaction |
| Runtime | deploy gate (nexus forensic --deploy-gate) before any release |
| Release | SHA-256 digests, manifests, SBOM, post-publish verification |
The 12 validation gates (candidate lifecycle)
The candidate validation path runs 12 gates over a candidate (manifest
integrity, schema family, scaler identity, dataset provenance, calibration,
OOS, robustness…). Governance verification adds a 14-gate matrix on top for
promotion readiness. A candidate that fails any gate is stored as CHALLENGER
at best — and only an operator can ever promote.
Failure handling
Rejections are recorded with evidence and stay public: the 70D OOS rejection
and the benchmark history are in Project Status. A
failed validation is a result, not an embarrassment — it is what makes the
passing cases meaningful.