Synthestat · Bulgaria · population QA

BG 1:1 population synthesis QA cycle

Country-specific layer for synthetic people in households, dwellings, real building stock where available, hidden-population overlays, and work/school assignment evidence.

Board: synthestat-population-qa · Tenant: synthestat · Country: BG · Overall status: done

Ideal-country quality criteria: impossible 1:1 benchmark

This is the common gold-standard benchmark for an ideal country. It is intentionally impossible to fully satisfy: complete success would mean a 1:1 replica of the real population where every person, household, dwelling, attribute, and assignment is exactly represented. The QA page uses it as an asymptote and gap taxonomy, not as a release promise.

Apply this same rubric to this country’s latest run, then report which needs are measured, constrained, modelled, unavailable, or blocked.

Need	Unachievable ideal	QA evidence we require instead	Why perfection cannot be achieved
Complete de jure resident coverage	Every real resident represented exactly once in the right country, municipality, small area, household, and dwelling.	Synthetic person count equals official population at all enforced geographies; no unexplained duplicate, missing, or out-of-universe people.	A true 1:1 resident list is a confidential population register and changes continuously; Synthestat can only match official aggregates and declared source universes.
Complete attribute truth	Each synthetic person has the same age, sex, household role, education, occupation, industry, origin, health proxy, income proxy, and lifecycle state as the corresponding real person.	Published marginal and cross-tab constraints pass within HARD/FIRM/SOFT tolerances; modelled fields carry uncertainty and measured/constrained/modelled provenance.	Official releases do not expose a complete individual joint distribution, and many attributes are survey-derived, lagged, suppressed, or unavailable at fine geography.
Perfect household and family structure	Every household contains the exact real members and relationships, including multi-generation, partnership, child, shared, institutional, and edge-case arrangements.	Household totals, household-type distributions, age/sex/role consistency, fertility/child constraints, and structural invariants pass with explicit residuals.	Household membership is sensitive microdata; public sources usually expose only aggregate household/family tables and partial cross-tabs.
Exact dwelling and building grounding	Every household is assigned to its real dwelling and building with exact occupancy, vacancy, dwelling type, floor area, tenure, and address-level geography.	Dwelling/building capacity checks pass; vacancy/second-home/institutional dwellings are represented or explicitly unavailable; building links have source provenance.	Many countries lack open address-level registers; dwelling occupancy is confidential and time-varying.
Complete de facto and hidden-population overlays	Homeless, undocumented, refugees, students away from home, seasonal, institutional, tourists, and daytime populations are all represented with exact location and timing.	Overlay layers use interval estimates, source-specific quality flags, and never silently modify de jure HARD constraints.	Hidden populations are partly unobserved by definition; ethical/privacy constraints forbid exact person-level labels.
Exact school, workplace, facility, and mobility assignment	Every person is assigned to the real school, workplace, care provider, commute, and daily activity chain they use.	Assignment layers use official registers/OD flows where available; modelled assignments are flagged and validated only against aggregate flows/capacities.	Operational assignments are usually protected registers or dynamic behavioural data; Phase 1 must not imply they are known.
Full joint-distribution realism	The full multivariate joint distribution is identical to reality across all attributes, households, geography, and rare subgroups.	High-priority marginals/cross-tabs pass; sparse zones and prior-dominated attributes are clearly marked with quality tiers and credible intervals.	The joint distribution is non-identifiable from published marginals; IPF/BN/hierarchical pooling choose plausible distributions, not truth.
Zero uncertainty and zero lag	All values are current today and known without error.	Every output records reference period, retrieval timestamp, lag, confidence, uncertainty bounds, and degradation decisions.	Official statistics are lagged, revised, sampled, suppressed, and harmonized after collection.
Privacy-safe yet maximally detailed release	The system releases maximum useful detail while creating zero re-identification risk.	Release mode, k-anonymity/cell safeguards, perturbation/aggregation policy, and sensitive-field treatment are explicit.	Fine-area synthetic microdata can still create structurally unique records; synthetic does not mean anonymous.
Perfect reproducibility and auditability	Any user can trace every output record to exact source snapshots, transformations, constraints, relaxations, seeds, and code versions.	Run manifests, source provenance, checksums, frozen extracts, seeds, versioned crosswalks, validation reports, and relaxation logs are complete.	This is approachable but never final: source portals, classifications, geography, and code keep changing, so audits must be continuously renewed.

Population output status

People	Target population	National coverage	Absolute shortfall	Households	Dwellings	Houses/buildings	Max marginal deviation	HARD status	Run
8	—	—	—	8	8	3	0.00%	pass_exact	`bg_population_review_cycle2_16b73a96_seed420987`

Deviation is the maximum absolute relative error across collected HARD/FIRM/SOFT marginal constraints in the latest review bundle. GUIDE/INFORMATIONAL priors are excluded. National target/coverage are read from build_manifest.json when available and override any visual impression of completion.

done

Datasets and distributions

Lists come from the latest run bundle: source_provenance.json, distribution_diagnostics.json, and build_manifest.json.

Summary

Datasets used	8
Distributions available	38
Constraints/distributions used in synthesis	43
Constraint types	FIRM: 7, GUIDE: 18, HARD: 2, SOFT: 11
Dataset variants	comparable_country: 11, current: 1, robust: 26
Finest-geography status	constrained: 27, modelled: 11

Source gaps

No live NSI retrieval adapter is implemented yet for BG Task 01.
Building integration is still fixture-backed and requires dwelling inference.
Current Bulgaria execution is an uncertainty-aware seeded slice, not a production national extraction path.

Datasets used

Dataset/source ID
`BG_ADMIN_address_context`
`BG_AGCC_seeded_buildings`
`BG_NSI_boundaries`
`BG_NSI_education`
`BG_NSI_employment`
`BG_NSI_households`
`BG_NSI_income`
`BG_NSI_population`

Best source by distribution family

Distribution family	Dataset/source ID
`D01_demographics_finest`	`BG_NSI_population`
`D05_education`	`BG_NSI_education`
`D12_household_type`	`BG_NSI_households`
`building_stock`	`BG_AGCC_seeded_buildings`
`employment_occupation_industry`	`BG_NSI_employment`
`geography_boundaries`	`BG_NSI_boundaries`
`income`	`BG_NSI_income`

Available distributions / priors in registry

Spec	Label	Type	Geo	Status	Variant	Confidence	Data URI
`C01_education_occupation_coupling`	Education-occupation coupling strength	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.6	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C02_assortative_mating_education`	Assortative mating by education	GUIDE	NUTS-1	modelled	comparable_country	0.61	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C03_assortative_mating_age`	Assortative mating by age	GUIDE	NUTS-1	modelled	comparable_country	0.68	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C04_assortative_mating_origin`	Assortative mating by origin	GUIDE	NUTS-1	modelled	comparable_country	0.62	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C05_spatial_sorting_education`	Spatial sorting by education	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.7	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C06_spatial_sorting_income`	Spatial sorting by income	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.7	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C07_spatial_sorting_origin`	Spatial sorting by origin	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.72	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C08_intergenerational_income_elasticity`	Intergenerational income elasticity	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.58	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C09_intergenerational_occupation_transmission`	Intergenerational occupation transmission	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.58	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C10_commuting_mode_distance`	Commuting mode × distance × occupation × region	GUIDE	NUTS-1	modelled	comparable_country	0.64	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`C11_health_age_sex_education`	Health × age × sex × education	GUIDE	national	modelled	comparable_country	0.62	`data/literature/seeded_occupation_priors.yaml`
`D01_age_sex_nuts3`	Age × sex at NUTS-3	HARD	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.74	`docs/wiki/compiled/D01_age_sex_nuts3.md`
`D01_census_age_sex_nuts3`	Census age × sex at NUTS-3	HARD	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.74	`docs/wiki/compiled/D01_census_age_sex_nuts3.md`
`D02_marital_nuts3`	Marital status × age × sex at NUTS-3	FIRM	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D02_marital_nuts3.md`
`D03_origin_age_sex`	Origin group × age × sex	FIRM	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D03_origin_age_sex.md`
`D04_religion_age_sex_region`	Religion × age × sex × region	GUIDE	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D04_religion_age_sex_region.md`
`D05_census_education_nuts3`	Census education at NUTS-3	FIRM	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D05_census_education_nuts3.md`
`D05_education_nuts2`	Education at NUTS-2	FIRM	NUTS-2	constrained	current	0.7	`docs/wiki/compiled/D05_education_nuts2.md`
`D06_employment_age_sex_education`	Employment status × age × sex × education	FIRM	unknown	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D06_employment_age_sex_education.md`
`D07_occupation_isco3`	Occupation ISCO-3 distribution	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D07_occupation_isco3.md`
`D08_occupation_education`	Occupation × education	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D08_occupation_education.md`
`D09_industry_nace2`	Industry NACE-2 distribution	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D09_industry_nace2.md`
`D10_income_education_occupation`	Income × education × occupation	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D10_income_education_occupation.md`
`D11_income_household_type_region`	Income × household type × region	SOFT	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D11_income_household_type_region.md`
`D12_household_type_size_region`	Household type × size × region	FIRM	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D12_household_type_size_region.md`
`D13_children_mother_age_education`	Children × mother age × education	SOFT	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D13_children_mother_age_education.md`
`D14_partner_age_gap_homogamy`	Partner age gap × homogamy	SOFT	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D14_partner_age_gap_homogamy.md`
`D15_coresidence_structure`	Co-residence structure	SOFT	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D15_coresidence_structure.md`
`D16_household_income_type_region`	Household income × type × region	SOFT	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D16_household_income_type_region.md`
`D17_education_mobility`	Education mobility	GUIDE	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D17_education_mobility.md`
`D18_occupation_given_education`	Occupation \| education	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D18_occupation_given_education.md`
`D19_employment_given_demographics`	Employment \| demographics	SOFT	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D19_employment_given_demographics.md`
`D20_birth_intervals`	Birth intervals	GUIDE	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D20_birth_intervals.md`
`D21_age_first_birth`	Age at first birth × education × cohort	GUIDE	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D21_age_first_birth.md`
`D22_age_leaving_home`	Age leaving home	GUIDE	unknown	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D22_age_leaving_home.md`
`D23_divorce_duration_children_education`	Divorce × duration × children × education	GUIDE	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D23_divorce_duration_children_education.md`
`D24_age_marriage_sex_education`	Age at marriage × sex × education	GUIDE	NUTS-3	constrained	robust	0.71	`docs/wiki/compiled/D24_age_marriage_sex_education.md`
`D25_internal_migration`	Internal migration	FIRM	unknown	constrained	robust	0.73	`docs/wiki/compiled/D25_internal_migration.md`

Constraints/distributions used in synthesis manifest

Constraint or distribution ID
`CORR_OCC_EMPLOYMENT`
`D01`
`D12`
`EMPLOYMENT_CODE_LINK`
`FIRM`
`GUIDE`
`HARD`
`HARMONIZATION`
`HH_CHILD_ADULT`
`HH_COUPLE_TWO_ADULTS`
`HH_SINGLE_SIZE_ONE`
`HH_SIZE_PLAUSIBLE`
`HMN_AGE_RANGE`
`HMN_BIRTH_DATE`
`HMN_BUILDING_SCHEMA`
`HMN_DWELLING_BUILDING_REF`
`HMN_DWELLING_SCHEMA`
`HMN_EDUCATION`
`HMN_EDUCATION_AGE`
`HMN_EDUCATION_GROUP`
`HMN_EMPLOYMENT`
`HMN_HOUSEHOLD_DWELLING_REF`
`HMN_HOUSEHOLD_SCHEMA`
`HMN_HOUSEHOLD_TYPE`
`HMN_INDUSTRY`
`HMN_MARITAL`
`HMN_OCCUPATION`
`HMN_ORIGIN`
`HMN_PERSON_HOUSEHOLD_REF`
`HMN_PERSON_SCHEMA`
`HMN_RETIRED_AGE`
`HMN_SEX`
`INFORMATIONAL`
`MODEL_FALLBACK_RATE`
`MODEL_REGISTRY_PROFILE`
`SPATIAL`
`SPT_BUILDING_COORDS`
`SPT_DWELLING_BUILDING_REF`
`SPT_DWELLING_HOUSEHOLD_REF`
`SPT_HH_DWELLING_REF`
`SPT_PERSON_HOUSEHOLD_REF`
`STRUCTURAL`
`XCN_COMPARABILITY`

Current country tasks

ID	Title	Assignee	Status	Created	Latest summary
t_d0b42f73	BG population cycle 2 review: seeded rerun with dwelling backrefs and unavailable layers preserved	synth-reviewer	done	2026-05-19 19:02:28 CEST	Reviewed BG cycle-2 bundle and wrote reviewer report at /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/reviewer/2026-05-19_170457Z_BG_population_review_cycle2.md. Verdict MODEL_IMPROVEMENT_EXHAUSTED_HUMAN_REVIEW: the bundle is contract-complete and dwelling backrefs are fixed for degraded seeded/intern
t_cef2680b	BG population rerun after source upgrades with degraded-layer metadata preserved	synth-modeler	done	2026-05-19 18:44:43 CEST	Built and verified BG cycle-2 population review bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/BG/bg_population_review_cycle2_16b73a96_seed420987 after rerunning the BG seeded synthesis/validation chain. The bundle is contract-complete for internal review, preserves explicit unavailable hidden/work-school/f
t_06ddffd0	BG joint and conditional distribution evidence for modelled Cxx/Dxx surfaces	synth-distributions-researcher	done	2026-05-19 18:44:33 CEST	Completed BG joint/conditional distribution evidence handoff. Wrote findings, extraction specs, refreshed distributions latest board, and appended manager update; strongest replacement sources are Eurostat Census 2021, Eurostat LFS/SILC, NSI open-data mirrors, with GGP Bulgaria as restricted-microda
t_6df5bc04	BG source gap closure for official marginals, buildings/dwellings, hidden populations, and assignments	synth-marginals-researcher	done	2026-05-19 18:44:23 CEST	Closed the BG marginal/source evidence pass with official NSI Census 2021 and timeseries source inventory, hidden-population/assignment gap flags, downloader queue, and manager update. Reports written under /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/marginals/, with EVIDENCE_EXHAUSTED explicitly ma
t_f9004c92	Review BG population synthesis bundle: cycle 1	synth-reviewer	done	2026-05-19 18:35:19 CEST	Reviewed BG cycle-1 bundle and wrote reviewer handoff at /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/reviewer/2026-05-19_164341Z_BG_population_review_cycle1.md. Verdict NEEDS_MORE_SOURCES: bundle is contract-complete and honest about seeded scope, but not passable as a country population due 2-zone/
t_6c64d812	BG population synthesis review bundle: cycle 1	synth-modeler	done	2026-05-19 18:35:03 CEST	Built and verified the BG cycle-1 population synthesis review bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/BG/bg_population_review_cycle1_85123614_seed420987. The bundle is contract-complete for internal research review with HARD constraints passing exactly, explicit unavailable markers for hidden-populat
t_2a07ba7d	orchestrate BG population synthesis QA loop	synth-manager	done	2026-05-19 18:34:13 CEST	Routed BG population synthesis QA cycle 1: created synth-modeler bundle-build task t_6c64d812 and dependent synth-reviewer bundle-review task t_f9004c92. Updated /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/manager_updates.md with bottleneck, routing, blocker, and next-action notes.

Process

Manager kickoff

synth-manager creates and controls the country loop.

Model build

synth-modeler generates the review bundle: people, households, dwellings/buildings or unavailable markers, overlays, assignments, manifests, residuals, diagnostics, uncertainty, provenance.

Reviewer gate

synth-reviewer audits constraints, marginals, household/family realism, hidden populations, dwelling/building grounding, work/school assignment, uncertainty, provenance, and privacy.

Branch

PASS finalizes; NEEDS_MODEL_FIX routes back to modeler; NEEDS_MORE_SOURCES routes to marginal/distribution researchers then downloader; exhausted evidence/model plateau stops for human decision.

Quality gates and stop conditions

PASS: satisfactory for declared country evidence tier and internal review mode.
NEEDS_MODEL_FIX: model logic, bundle, uncertainty, household/dwelling/assignment issue.
NEEDS_MORE_SOURCES: missing marginal or joint/conditional evidence; researchers then downloader.
EVIDENCE_EXHAUSTED_HUMAN_REVIEW: source search cannot responsibly improve the output.
MODEL_IMPROVEMENT_EXHAUSTED_HUMAN_REVIEW: modeler cannot materially improve or diagnostics plateau.