Reference

Glossary

Terms used consistently across this documentation, collected in one place for reference.

Terms

Calibration target. A versioned set of real-world moments — income deciles, household size distribution, employment shares — that a generator’s output is fit to reproduce. Sourced from releases like EU-SILC and Eurostat and identified by a fixed version string, e.g. eu-silc-2023-v2.

Claim. A quantitative economic statement submitted to claimcheck.validate, e.g. “AI raised task exposure 14% in 2025.” claimcheck normalizes the claim, resolves it against the source registry, and returns evidence, assumptions, and a confidence band.

Confidence band. The (low, high) interval returned as .confidence_band on a claimcheck result. Computed by resampling across the weighted evidence set rather than pooling individually reported source intervals; see uncertainty bands.

Assumption graph. The directed acyclic graph of assumptions underlying a claimcheck result, inspected via r.assumptions.graph(). Edges represent dependency: challenging an assumption marks everything downstream of it as unresolved.

Environment lockfile. The resolved set of dependency versions a generator ran under. Recorded in a provenance manifest as a hash (environment_lockfile_sha256) rather than in full, so two environments can be confirmed equivalent without exchanging the full lockfile.

Evidence set. The full collection of sources a claim’s estimate draws on, each carrying a contribution weight. The confidence band is computed by resampling across this set.

Generator. A fully specified synthetic data procedure: a calibration target, a sampling procedure, and a seed. household_panel is the flagship generator; running one via synthetic.generate is deterministic given the same three inputs and generator version.

Hash chain. The sequence of checksums in a provenance manifest’s source_data_hash_chain field, linking a calibration target back through its derivation steps to the specific statistical release it came from.

Provenance manifest. The JSON document a generator run emits alongside its output, recording the seed, generator version, calibration target version, environment lockfile hash, and source data hash chain needed to reproduce or verify the run. See provenance manifests.

Seed. The integer that determines every random draw in a generator’s sampling procedure. Same generator version, same calibration target, same seed: same output, every time.

Source registry. The public, queryable index of primary sources claimcheck validates claims against. Each entry carries a license, access terms, a retrieval date, and a checksum of the retrieved artifact. See source registry.