Skip to content

Add a Populace US poverty/SPM diagnostic gate for resource distribution and negative-income tails #33

Description

@MaxGhenis

Problem

Populace needs a US validation diagnostic for the SPM/resource distribution failure modes we are investigating. These should be diagnostics, not calibration hard targets.

The diagnostic should report:

  • SPM poverty rate, population count, and subgroup rates from the Populace artifact under current PolicyEngine-US.
  • Resource distribution diagnostics: median/quantiles of SPM resources and relevant subgroup cuts.
  • Negative-resource diagnostics: minimum SPM-unit resources, count/share with negative resources, total negative mass, and largest contributing variables where available.
  • Validation metadata for official/public SPM references and raw CPS reproduction checks where feasible.
  • Target residual context from source-backed hard-target families once the source coverage work lands.

Guardrails

  • Do not make Census CPS SPM, DINA, or ACS poverty rates hard calibration targets.
  • Treat this as a release validation diagnostic/gate; the artifact should publish the numbers and reference identity.
  • Do not persist computed SPM outputs as inputs just to pass diagnostics.

Acceptance criteria

  • A reproducible command/test can produce a structured poverty_spm_diagnostics.json or equivalent release artifact.
  • The diagnostic includes version/reference metadata for PolicyEngine-US, the Populace artifact, and validation references.
  • Tests cover negative-resource summary math, validation-only classification, and a small fixture with known poverty/resource results.
  • Release manifest or diagnostics index links to the poverty/SPM diagnostic artifact.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    enhancementNew feature or request

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions