The companion to the Kalman fix. RecursiveLeastSquares.from_dict and
AdaptiveConformal.from_dict restore lambda, delta, alpha, gamma and the
conformal window alongside their data, and load_dict replaces the
config-built heads with those, so every one of those knobs was immutable on
any station that already had state. Editing config.yaml and restarting looks
exactly like a change with no effect, which is the failure mode that cost real
time on the Kalman side of this before it was found.
Only the estimate is state now. Weights, covariances and conformal scores are
restored; tuning is re-applied from config on every load. The conformal deques
are rebuilt when the configured window changes, preserving their contents.
load_dict also skips heads for a target or horizon this build no longer has,
rather than resurrecting them from a stale file.
Found while implementing a damped-trend ensemble member, which was then
abandoned: see the following note.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Reported from a real station after 1.5 days: a six hour temperature forecast of
53 C in a 24 C room, and 9 C at one day, both carrying a plus or minus of 0.43.
Confidently wrong is the one failure this project is supposed to refuse.
Root cause. fit() replayed history into the live RLS on every retrain tick and
never reset, so 453 grid rows had produced 64,676 updates in a day and a half.
RLS with forgetting reads every update as fresh evidence, so the model believed
it had a hundred times the data it had: P collapsed, in-sample error looked
excellent, and the weights drifted without bound in directions the data never
excited. Measured: cond(P) 3.1e9 and ||theta|| 1680 against a median |theta| of
1.67. A refit now starts from the prior, which makes retraining idempotent.
Across 25 refits on the real data ||theta|| holds at 11.35, drifting 0.03, where
before it grew without limit.
The two largest weights were sin_doy and cos_doy at +1174 and +1191. Annual
harmonics were in the design matrix from the first sample, where they are
near-constant, near-collinear with each other and with the bias, and a
rank-deficient regressor is what RLS answers with enormous cancelling weights.
They are now held at zero until the record spans the same 120 days the
climatology fit already requires, because a day and a half of data says nothing
whatsoever about the season.
Also raised the standardiser's variance floor from 1e-8, which only caught a
bit-exactly constant column, to 1e-3. A feature that merely barely moves was
being divided by its own noise.
The conformal calibrators and Hedge weights are deliberately not reset by a
refit: those are earned from scored forecasts, not from this regression.
Backtest unchanged within noise, coverage still 89 to 91 across all 18 heads.
Four regression tests added, including that refitting the same history twice
must give the same model.
kemalandClaude Opus 5