Confidence floor

A confidence floor is a bar the vendor states, enforces in code and publishes the coverage cost of: below it, no match is returned at all. Most resolvers do the opposite. They expose a threshold as a tunable parameter and leave the caller to pick one, which pushes the hardest decision onto the person with the least evidence.

A floor is only meaningful if three things hold. It is a property of the system rather than a default a caller can lower, or it is a suggestion. It is enforced everywhere a match can be constructed — online, batch and replay — because a guarantee with one unguarded route is not one. And the coverage it costs is published beside it, since any floor looks good if you report only the records that cleared it.

Entity Bind's floor is 0.90, held in a constant called MIN_ACCEPTED_MATCH_CONFIDENCE. A match below 0.90 confidence is unrepresentable. The record comes back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist instead.

Where it is enforced matters more than its value. The rule lives on the type that represents a resolution outcome, so a sub-floor match cannot be constructed anywhere in the codebase. Enforced as a domain invariant on the resolution outcome and again by a predicate called on the online, batch and replay paths, so a sub-floor accepted match cannot be constructed on any of them. A cached replay whose inherited confidence has fallen below the floor is withheld rather than re-served.

Read a floor for what it is. It is an acceptance contract, not calibration evidence: it says what we refuse to return, not how often an accepted match is right. Read it with the coverage it costs. Two carve-outs sit alongside it. A merge a human reviewer approves is recorded against the reviewer, excluded from the automated population every accuracy figure is measured over, and withheld on replay. And: A new entity minted because nothing matched is not a match and is not subject to the floor. Its reject-side confidence can fall as low as 0.6752, on 27 observations.

A stricter threshold needs its own coverage evaluation. Confidence bounds depend on the recorded evidence population; there is no universal score for every match. Read match_confidence_basis and the evidence. A 0.99 filter can return some v8 adjudicated matches while excluding valid identifier matches, so validate its coverage cost on your own inputs.