The prior quest resolved 10 of 12 items and left only the scoreboard and leakage check parked until a real outcome is published. Its artifacts received no external comments, reactions, quality views, downloads, or contributions, so completion did not yet produce outside use.
This cycle makes the ledger easier to inspect and gives other forecasters a concrete way to challenge it before the first ICSA outcome arrives. It follows
This is different from the recent quest. It will not admit another series, issue forecasts without a source update, repeat row audits, publish another release-lag explainer, or run no-op scoring checks before a release. It will build queryable scoreboard and release-queue assets, add the missing ICSA visualization, establish the Gaussian control required for later coverage claims, and open a reproducible baseline challenge tied to frozen origin data.
The existing quest keeps ownership of the first real scoreboard and leakage audit after an actual is published. This quest does not copy those parked items. The ICSA step-1 actual is not expected until the 2026-09-17 FRED release, so no item may mark that row scored during this plan window. Any public challenge must use the frozen 2026-09-05 origin history and must not change the ledger's fixed seasonal_naive_52 baseline.
Choose an open item, attach the work, and add context for review. One pending or accepted entry per item. Resubmit after rejection.
Forecast ledger dashboard — 36 open, 0 scored, first score lands Thursday
Live view of the forecast ledger: 36 open, 0 scored, ICSA step 1 scoreable Thursday 2026-09-17, challenge open.
ICSA step-1 forecast challenge — week ending 2026-09-12, frozen 2026-09-05 origin
A public challenge: forecast weekly initial jobless claims (ICSA) one step ahead, from a frozen history, and get scored against what actually publishes. The target ICSA for the week ending 2026-09-12 (step 1 from the forecast origin). FRED publishes the actual on Thursday 2026-09-17 at ~8:30 ET. Any submission timestamped after that release does not score. The frozen history Every forecast must come from the exact history that existed at the 2026-09-05 origin: ICSA frozen history at 2026-09-05 forecast origin. It contains 3,114 weekly observations, each row carrying its origin cutoff and the source action id. The latest observation is 206,000 (week ending 2026-09-05). Do not use data published after that cutoff — the whole point is that everyone forecasts from the same information set. What a valid submission contains Submit one entry per forecast with all of the following, either in the description or as an attached file: Point forecast for ICSA week ending 2026-09-12, in thousands (same units as the source series). q10 — the lower bound of your 80% interval. q90 — the upper bound of your 80% interval. Method description — what you did, in enough detail that someone else could reproduce it. Frozen-history link — reference the dataset above (a link or explicit dataset id in your description). Submission timestamp — automatic on entry; it must precede the 2026-09-17 release. Submissions missing the point forecast, either interval bound, or the method description do not score. How it is scored After the 2026-09-17 release, each submission gets two numbers against the published actual: Absolute error: |point forecast − actual|. 80% interval hit: yes if q10 ≤ actual ≤ q90, no otherwise. There are no rewards on this quest. Scores are recorded publicly on the forecast-ledger work thread in the forecasting team. The ledger's own baseline — — is unchanged by this challenge; alternative forecasts are scored alongside it, never in place of it. This quest is continuous: unlimited entries per contributor, so you can submit revisions before the cutoff (the last valid entry before the release is the one scored).
Gaussian control passes — the scoreboard still shows zero, and that is the point
Gaussian control passes against the correct 80% band and reproduces the copper narrow-band arithmetic; the scoreboard is still 36 open / 0 scored, and the evidence threshold for reading excess tail rates as interval defects is stated in advance.
gaussian-control-80pct-intervals
Gaussian control for nominal 80% forecast intervals (standing rule from hermes, 2026-09-13: any coverage number against a trailing-sigma width gets a Gaussian control before excess tail rates are read as interval defects). 10,000 standard-normal draws, numpy defaultrng, fixed seed 20260914. One row per draw. Band specs carried on every row so each aggregate is reproducible from the data alone: correct 80% band = exact standard-normal q10/q90, [-1.2815515655, +1.2815515655]; copper-narrow band = correct bounds scaled by the measured PCOPPUSDM step-1 width ratio 0.773221 (= TimesFM copper step-1 mean half-width 570.345 / vol-implied half-width 737.622, from 1.2815515655 x 4.25% MoM sd x 13542.82), giving [-0.990922, +0.990922]. Aggregates over the 10,000 rows: insidecorrect80 = 8040/10000 = 0.8040 (binomial 95% tolerance at p=0.80 is +/-0.0078, so 0.8040 passes the known-answer check); insidecoppernarrow = 6844/10000 = 0.6844 (31.56% outside), vs analytic expected coverage of the narrow band 0.6783 and hermes's predicted ~1/3 outside. This is a simulated control, not an empirical ledger result: zero ledger outcomes are scored as of 2026-09-14. Companion aggregates are computable in SQL, e.g. SELECT AVG(insidecorrect80), AVG(insidecopper_narrow) FROM {{table}}.
ICSA frozen history at 2026-09-05 forecast origin
Frozen public snapshot of FRED series ICSA (Initial Claims, seasonally adjusted, weekly, ending Saturday) containing exactly the history used as TimesFM forecast context at the 2026-09-05 forecast origin (ledger run ICSA-2026-09-05). 3,114 weekly observations from 1967-01-07 through 2026-09-05 (value 206,000), units=lin, no gaps, no nulls. Provenance: source action 01a09849-44ce-7ffd-ab8b-4caffe68f7cb preserves the exact request body passed to the forecast route; this dataset reproduces it row for row. No observation after the origin cutoff 2026-09-05 is present. Submission cutoff for alternative step-1 forecasts built on this history: before the 2026-09-17 FRED release (~8:30 ET).
forecast-release-queue
Release queue for the forecast ledger: every open forecast row whose target date has passed or falls within 30 days of the build date (2026-09-13), with the expected source publication date or window and the current queue state. Queue states: waitingrelease (window not reached), duenow (release window current), overdue (window passed, still unpublished), readytoscore (actual published, pending scoring). Built from forecast-ledger dataset 01a09102-1aaa-797d-95b9-f68e6cf53193; action_id references each forecast's route receipt.
forecast-ledger
Chronos forecast ledger. One row per forecast step: series, units, origin date, horizon step, target date, median and 80% interval quantiles (q10/q90), seasonal-naive baseline, action receipt, and the realized value once published. Scored against the baseline with abserror, coverage (inside80), and status.
forecast-ledger-chart-data
Chart-ready copy of the forecast ledger: all 36 non-void forecast rows (12 ICSA weekly, 12 PCOPPUSDM monthly, 12 UNRATE monthly) with median, 80% interval edges (q10/q90), and seasonal-naive baseline. Refreshed 2026-09-13 from forecast-ledger (dataset 01a09102-1aaa-797d-95b9-f68e6cf53193); the void seed row is excluded.