Synthestat · Kosovo · population QA
XK 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: XK · 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | xk_population_national_candidate_2024_muni_bf4a4f87_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
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Datasets and distributions
Lists come from the latest run bundle: source_provenance.json, distribution_diagnostics.json, and build_manifest.json.
Summary
| Datasets used | 0 |
|---|---|
| Distributions available | 0 |
| Constraints/distributions used in synthesis | 3 |
| Constraint types | — |
| Dataset variants | — |
| Finest-geography status | — |
Source gaps
- No source gaps listed.
Datasets used
| Dataset/source ID |
|---|
| None listed yet. |
Best source by distribution family
| Distribution family | Dataset/source ID |
|---|---|
| None listed yet. | |
Available distributions / priors in registry
| Spec | Label | Type | Geo | Status | Variant | Confidence | Data URI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None listed yet. | |||||||
Constraints/distributions used in synthesis manifest
| Constraint or distribution ID |
|---|
XK_ASK_CENSUS2024_POPULATION_TOTAL |
XK_ASK_CENSUS2024_HOUSEHOLDS_TOTAL |
XK_ASK_CENSUS2024_CONVENTIONAL_DWELLINGS_TOTAL |
Current country tasks
| ID | Title | Assignee | Status | Created | Latest summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t_8faf3e07 | XK model fix: household realism and diagnostics consistency for national candidate | synth-modeler | done | 2026-05-19 20:31:29 CEST | Rebuilt the XK national candidate with age-aware adult-reference household assignment, capped private 10+ households, explicit unresolved residual buckets, recomputed household diagnostics, consistent +12 dwelling residual documentation, and reconciled provenance hash semantics. The rebuilt bundle a |
| t_dde41951 | XK review: national-scale population artifact gap closure | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 20:16:54 CEST | Reviewed XK national-scale candidate and returned NEEDS_MODEL_FIX. The bundle is no longer fixture-scale and matches national population/household HARD counts, but fails household realism and metadata consistency: 125,638 all-under-15 households, 25,535 single-under-15 households, 144,336 under-18 r |
| t_09539cea | XK national-scale population artifact gap: replace seeded PASS fixture or block with exact source/model requirements | synth-modeler | done | 2026-05-19 20:16:47 CEST | Built a concrete XK/Kosovo national-scale municipality-constrained candidate bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/XK/xk_population_national_candidate_2024_muni_bf4a4f87_seed420987 instead of relabelling the 8-person seeded PASS fixture. The candidate matches ASK/KAS 2024 national population (1,602 |
| t_8c1055f3 | XK final human review/delivery note after PASS | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 20:00:27 CEST | Prepared the XK final human review/delivery readiness note after PASS, preserving the narrow internal seeded-slice scope and explicit caveats that the PASS is not nationwide production or external-release readiness. Wrote mirrored notes under docs/wiki/outputs and workspace/manager_handoffs/reviewer |
| t_fa6e2720 | XK population QA cycle 1: review bundle | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 18:35:53 CEST | PASS: reviewed XK cycle-1 bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/XK/xk_population_review_cycle1_3bf65dd8_seed420987; it is fit for internal research review of the declared seeded Kosovo slice, with no critical failures. Full report: /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/reviewer/2026-05-19_164 |
| t_65697679 | XK population QA cycle 1: build review bundle | synth-modeler | done | 2026-05-19 18:35:39 CEST | Built and verified the XK cycle-1 population review bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/XK/xk_population_review_cycle1_3bf65dd8_seed420987. The bundle is contract-complete for internal review, HARD constraints pass exactly, legacy seeded household type labels were normalized to harmonized HH_SING |
| t_c9a0bae6 | orchestrate XK population synthesis QA loop | synth-manager | done | 2026-05-19 18:34:15 CEST | Routed XK population synthesis QA cycle 1: created synth-modeler bundle-build task t_65697679 and dependent synth-reviewer bundle-review task t_fa6e2720. Updated /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/manager_updates.md with bottleneck, routing, blockers, and next-branch 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.