test: calibrate the marginals against the exact posterior

Investigation for #46 and #47, before touching either.

A scored history is linear-Gaussian, so its true joint posterior has a
closed form and the crate can be checked against ground truth. Measured
on five competitors:

                    means      marginal sd (crate / exact)
    tree (star)     exact      1.000
    loopy (robin)   exact      0.502

On a tree the crate is exact in both. With cycles the means stay exact —
the standard Gaussian-BP result, and the property ratings rely on —
while marginal variances come out about half the true width.

That is the opposite direction from what #47 reports, so whatever is
happening in that consumer's model, the crate being conservative is not
it.

It also means #46 cannot be implemented as an added covariance accessor.
The exact correlation between two nodes here is +0.857, so ignoring it
overstates the width of a difference — but the too-narrow marginals
partially cancel that, leaving 1.327x rather than 2.646x. Adding true
correlations to these marginals without correcting them would give 0.765
against a true 1.524: overconfident, which is the direction the reporter
specifically called unsafe.

Pins the two real invariants (exactness on a tree, exact means with
cycles) and deliberately only records the variance gap, since closing it
is what #46 proposes.

Also records the working rules this project has converged on: investigate
before implementing, fix the root issue, and scout crates.io on measured
accuracy rather than adoption.

Refs #46, #47

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011hcFjNDmHXZF8URGLku5zZ
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-08 01:38:46 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 71554fd944
commit 36eacf5f67
2 changed files with 272 additions and 0 deletions
+14
View File
@@ -24,6 +24,20 @@ is where several defects have hidden — a debug-only run is not evidence.
- `approx``approx::AbsDiffEq` etc. for `Gaussian`. Most numerical goldens need it.
- `rayon` — opt-in parallel within-slice sweep and per-slice query passes.
## Working rules
- **Investigate before implementing.** Measure the actual behaviour first —
against an analytic reference where one exists. Several "obvious" fixes in
this repo turned out to be wrong in sign or unnecessary, and the measurement
is what caught them.
- **Fix the root issue, not the symptom.** A clamp that hides an underflow, or
a tolerance loosened to make a test pass, is a defect deferred.
- **Scout crates.io before hand-rolling numerics.** Check accuracy against an
independent reference rather than trusting downloads: `puruspe` has 1.4M
downloads and is 346 ULP off in the tail, where `libm` is 1. Fewer
dependencies is preferable, not mandatory — take the dependency when it is
measurably better.
## Architecture
A Rust port of [TrueSkillThroughTime.py](https://github.com/glandfried/TrueSkillThroughTime.py):