Forecast Assurance Decision Review

The buyer problem

You are about to buy, renew, or deploy a third-party forecasting system. The vendor's demo beats naive baselines. The decision that actually moves capital and operations is narrower: does the candidate beat the forecast you already operate on, under rules fixed before anyone sees the score?

The method

The candidate is tested against your mandatory incumbent on identical timestamps, under a machine-verifiable contract that includes agreed parameters such as data, horizon, information set, folds, metric, segments, and adoption threshold. The pipeline computes the metrics and fails closed on missing inputs, misaligned timestamps, leakage, hash mismatch, or a claim that conflicts with the canonical result. The verdict is one of three: adopt, reject, or inconclusive, based on whether the candidate forecast meets predefined criteria against the incumbent under fixed rules.

You supply

• Candidate and incumbent forecasts over an agreed window
• Actual outcomes + timestamp/timezone definitions
• The information set available to each forecast
• Operating context, the decision, and its deadline
• Appropriate data permissions

You receive

• Forecast Adoption Decision Memo — the executive verdict, defensible internally
• Forecast Assurance Evidence Package — frozen contract, manifests, fold results, leakage/alignment checks, metric calculations, adversarial review, limitations, machine-verifiable decision record, hash manifest
• Reproduction runbook and a technical readout
• Performance by agreed operating segment, and a failure/limitation analysis

Scope, timeline, fee

Excluded unless separately contracted

• Model development · production deployment · monitoring
• Procurement representation · vendor selection
• Legal, regulatory, or cybersecurity certification
• Any guarantee of future forecasting performance

Independence & data handling

• The fee is fixed and does not depend on the outcome of the evaluation. Negative results publish plainly.
• Sponsored work is disclosed; the protocol is frozen first; BQS controls the verdict; publication rights are defined in advance.
• No external data egress occurs by default; storage, retention, and deletion boundaries are defined and documented before data is moved.