Synthestat · Luxembourg · population QA
LU 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: LU · Overall status: ready
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | lu_national_gap_assessment_20260519_1819 |
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.
todo
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blocked
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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 | 0 |
| 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 |
|---|
| None listed yet. |
Current country tasks
| ID | Title | Assignee | Status | Created | Latest summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t_50596b3a | LU review: national-scale population artifact gap closure | synth-reviewer | todo | 2026-05-19 20:15:28 CEST | |
| t_a6be867f | LU national-scale population artifact gap: replace seeded PASS fixture or block with exact source/model requirements | synth-modeler | blocked | 2026-05-19 20:15:21 CEST | National LU build blocked: current artifact is only 9 persons/9 households vs STATEC 681,973 residents (2025-01-01) and RP2021 250,325 private households; live LU sources/building/cross-border/hidden/work-school evidence must be fixed before a national review bundle can be produced. |
| t_380fa200 | LU final human review/delivery note after PASS | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 20:12:41 CEST | Prepared the LU final human-facing PASS delivery/readiness note in both requested locations. The note preserves that PASS applies only to the internal seeded two-zone Luxembourg slice, explicitly says it is not nationwide 1:1 production readiness or external-release approval, and lists artefact path |
| t_681a61c6 | LU cycle 1 re-review after model/bundle fix | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 19:59:53 CEST | Reviewed the corrected LU cycle-2 bundle and returned PASS for the declared internal seeded two-zone review scope only. The bundle is contract-complete, HARD/FIRM residuals pass, household/dwelling/building joins are fixed and consistent, unavailable layers and live-source degradation are explicit, |
| t_18490917 | LU cycle 1 model/bundle fix after NEEDS_MODEL_FIX | synth-modeler | done | 2026-05-19 19:59:23 CEST | Built and verified the corrected LU cycle-2 population review bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/LU/lu_population_review_cycle2_73b5ddf1_seed420987. The reviewer-blocking reciprocal linkage defect is fixed: synthetic_dwellings.household_id is populated 1..9 from authoritative household-dwelling |
| t_b7494770 | LU population synthesis QA cycle 1: review bundle | synth-reviewer | done | 2026-05-19 18:42:02 CEST | Reviewed LU cycle-1 bundle and wrote reviewer handoff at /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/reviewer/2026-05-19_165118Z_LU_population_review_cycle1.md. Verdict NEEDS_MODEL_FIX: bundle is present/readable and HARD/FIRM residual summaries pass, but PASS is blocked because synthetic_dwellings. |
| t_c006b7d1 | LU population synthesis QA cycle 1: build review bundle | synth-modeler | done | 2026-05-19 18:41:42 CEST | Built and verified the LU cycle-1 population synthesis review bundle at /home/synthestat/output/runs/LU/lu_population_review_cycle1_73b5ddf1_seed420987. The bundle is contract-complete for internal research review, with HARD constraints passing exactly and explicit unavailable files for hidden/cross |
| t_59cdb7d9 | orchestrate LU population synthesis QA loop | synth-manager | done | 2026-05-19 18:40:07 CEST | Routed LU population synthesis QA cycle 1: created synth-modeler bundle-build task t_c006b7d1 and dependent synth-reviewer bundle-review task t_b7494770. Updated /home/synthestat/workspace/manager_handoffs/manager_updates.md with bottleneck summary, routing decisions, blockers, and next branch point |
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.