{"actors":["Agency enforcement intake analysts","Investigators and case supervisors","Agency general counsel or delegated legal reviewers","Regulated parties and their counsel","Administrative review or appeals officers","Agency data-governance and audit staff"],"affected_objective":"Lawful and timely enforcement triage that responds to accumulating harm while preserving procedural boundaries, reviewability, and proportionate treatment of similarly situated parties.","arm":"COMMON_P1","authority_safety":{"authorized_first_step":"The agency's legal, program, and data-governance leads may authorize a retrospective shadow review of closed cases using already-authorized records; outputs remain analytical annotations and cannot alter any case outcome.","decision_authority":"Only officials who already hold statutory or delegated authority may change enforcement priority, initiate compulsory process, issue notice, impose a sanction, or revise a procedural rule. Model maintainers may recommend representation changes but may not exercise those powers.","excluded_actions":["No automated initiation, escalation, settlement, or sanction","No alteration of statutory deadlines, evidentiary standards, appeal rights, or jurisdictional limits","No use of variables that investigators were not legally authorized to consider","No retroactive change to closed-case outcomes","No disclosure of protected case information beyond existing access permissions","No replacement of required individualized legal judgment with a model state or score"],"halt_rollback":"Halt the shadow review if the hybrid rules cannot be reconstructed from source records, encode legally impermissible factors, systematically obscure contested evidence, or create unexplained priority changes near boundaries. Roll back by discarding derived states and retaining the existing case record and workflow as the operative system."},"baseline":"A stage-based case-management dashboard represents matters as discrete statuses such as intake, investigation, legal review, and closed. Supervisors supplement those statuses with periodic narrative reports and aggregate age or workload averages, but continuous changes in alleged harm, evidence decay, remediation, and exposure are not represented consistently within stages.","candidate_id":"discrete_continuous_model_selection__law_governance__COMMON_P1","causal_chain":["The stage-only baseline treats long intervals between formal procedural events as internally uniform.","While a case remains in one stage, alleged harm, affected-party exposure, evidence staleness, remediation, and uncertainty can change gradually.","Those within-stage changes may remain buried in narratives or portfolio averages, so supervisors cannot consistently distinguish two cases carrying the same status but different trajectories.","A purely continuous priority score would recover trajectory information but could smooth away legally significant events—such as valid service, a response deadline, withdrawal of consent, a jurisdictional finding, or issuance of an order—that change permissible agency action discontinuously.","The hybrid representation therefore retains auditable procedural events as discrete state changes while recording selected continuous trajectories between them.","Explicit switching rules prevent a continuous score from implying authority that has not arisen and prevent a workflow label from erasing material within-stage change.","Transition-resolution review compares the hybrid reconstruction with source records, boundary cases, and actual supervisory decisions before any operational use.","If the representation better preserves decision-relevant trajectories and legal transitions without adding unsupported precision, authorized supervisors can consider a separately approved prospective shadow pilot."],"cell_id":"discrete_continuous_model_selection__law_governance","consequence":"Cases with the same workflow label can receive insufficiently differentiated attention despite different harm or evidence trajectories, while attempts to correct this with a single smooth risk score can blur procedural events that determine what the agency is legally permitted to do. The resulting representation can support delayed review, unexplained priority changes, or action taken without a visible authority transition.","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed against prior proposals because runtime isolation prohibits inspecting them; this candidate is specifically organized around a hybrid representation of continuous case trajectories and discrete legal-authority events.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","intervention":"Create an auditable hybrid enforcement-case timeline for supervisory triage. Represent legally operative events—jurisdiction confirmed, notice validly served, response received or waived, compulsory authority activated, order issued, appeal filed, and closure—as discrete transitions with source citations and explicit boundary rules. Between those events, display separately sourced continuous trajectories for alleged harm exposure, evidence staleness, remediation progress, and uncertainty, using only measurement resolution supported by the record. Continuous indicators may reorder human review within the set of actions already legally available, but they cannot create a new authority state. Review boundary cases and sampling gaps retrospectively before considering prospective shadow use.","mechanism_mapping":[{"counterfactual_removal":"Removing discrete event modeling would allow gradual indicators to obscure the moments when legal authority, duties, or review rights change.","mechanism_slug":"discrete_event_model","role":"Represents legally significant filings, findings, notices, orders, and appeals as timestamped state changes."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Removing the continuous component would leave cases within the same formal stage indistinguishable despite different harm, remediation, evidence, or uncertainty trajectories.","mechanism_slug":"continuous_process_model","role":"Represents supported within-stage accumulation, decay, and remediation as trajectories rather than additional arbitrary case categories."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Removing the hybrid rule would permit either procedural status to erase gradual change or continuous indicators to imply authority not created by a valid legal event.","mechanism_slug":"hybrid_discrete_continuous_model","role":"Combines continuous case conditions with discrete procedural modes and constrains which information may affect decisions in each mode."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Removing the resolution audit would leave unknown whether reporting cadence misses rapid changes or whether apparent trajectories are artifacts of sparse documentation.","mechanism_slug":"transition_resolution_audit","role":"Tests event timing, measurement cadence, missing intervals, and boundary reconstruction against the underlying record."}],"nearest_rivals":["A refined workflow-state taxonomy that adds more discrete case stages but does not model within-stage trajectories","A single continuous enforcement-priority score that does not separately encode authority-changing procedural events","Periodic supervisor case conferences based on narrative summaries without a common step-versus-flow representation","A threshold alert system that triggers review at fixed indicator values without first validating the underlying representation"],"negative_tests":{"intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is undermined if blinded retrospective reviewers using the hybrid timeline do not reconstruct legally significant transitions or trajectory-dependent priority distinctions more consistently than when using the existing record, or if most differences are produced by unsupported interpolation, unstable boundary rules, or variables that cannot lawfully inform triage.","problem_falsifier":"The proposed problem is undermined if closed-case review shows that decision-relevant conditions change almost exclusively at the existing workflow transitions, within-stage trajectories are immaterial to supervisory choices, and recorded errors arise from staffing, noncompliance with established procedure, or missing authority rather than representation granularity.","risks":["Continuous indicators may acquire de facto decisional force despite being labeled advisory.","Sparse records may be interpolated into false precision.","Event definitions may encode contested legal interpretations as technical facts.","Additional visibility may expose protected or privileged information to unauthorized users.","Priority trajectories may reflect historical enforcement bias embedded in source records.","A more complex representation may increase documentation burden and reduce usability.","Parties near model boundaries may be treated inconsistently if switching rules are ambiguous.","Staff may optimize recorded indicators rather than underlying compliance or harm."],"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would be a retrospective sample showing that the existing discrete stages already coincide with every legally and operationally material change, that supervisors reliably recover within-stage trajectories from current records, and that alternative representations do not change any permissible triage decision."},"next_evidence_step":"With legal and data-governance approval, select 40 consecutively closed cases from one enforcement program and a fixed six-month closure window. Mask final dispositions from two qualified reviewers. For each case, reconstruct the existing stage view and the proposed hybrid timeline solely from timestamped source records; record unresolved event boundaries rather than imputing them. Compare reviewer agreement on authority state, identification of material within-stage change, priority ordering within legally permissible action sets, boundary-case explanations, missing-data burden, and reconstruction time. Do not deploy outputs or reopen cases; stop after the 40-case review and require a documented go/no-go decision for any further pilot.","observable_state":"For each matter, the system exposes a timestamped sequence of legally operative events with source citations; the current authority state and available actions; continuous, separately labeled trajectories for alleged harm exposure, evidence staleness, remediation progress, and uncertainty; the cadence and provenance of each observation; missing-data intervals; disputed or unresolved event boundaries; and an audit log showing which information contributed to a human review-priority recommendation.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","problem":"An enforcement agency governs cases through coarse workflow stages even though material case conditions evolve continuously between formal legal events. The stage model can hide accumulating harm, evidence decay, or remediation, while an undifferentiated continuous risk score would hide the procedural jumps that create or terminate agency authority. Supervisors therefore lack a representation that preserves both within-stage change and legally operative boundaries.","proposal_index":1,"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Unlike a richer state taxonomy, a continuous priority score, or a threshold alert alone, this candidate makes model-form selection the intervention: gradual case conditions remain continuous only within explicitly bounded legal modes, and only sourced procedural events can change the authority state.","revision_record":{"claim_changes":["Initial version makes no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size.","Claims are limited to a testable representation problem and a conditional intervention rationale."],"conceptual_changes":["Initial candidate instantiates the archetype as a hybrid model of continuous case trajectories and discrete legal-authority transitions."],"evidence_changes":["No prior-art or external evidence was consulted.","A bounded retrospective comparison is specified as the first evidence step."],"operational_changes":["Initial version restricts work to closed cases in shadow analysis.","Human legal authority, source citation, missing-data notation, halt conditions, and prohibited actions are explicit."],"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Concrete domain problem","Observable hybrid state","Causal preservation of step-versus-flow selection","Authority and safeguards","Problem and intervention falsifiers","Bounded first evidence step"]},"schema_version":1,"structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Decision Need","domain_realization":"Supervisors must prioritize review and choose among actions already legally available without confusing urgency with legal authority."},{"archetype_element":"Process Change Signature","domain_realization":"Harm, remediation, evidence quality, and uncertainty may accumulate or decay continuously, while filings, service, jurisdictional findings, orders, and appeals change case status through discrete events."},{"archetype_element":"Cost of False Smoothness","domain_realization":"Smoothing a valid notice, jurisdictional determination, appeal, or order into a risk trajectory can conceal the instant when powers, duties, or review rights change."},{"archetype_element":"Cost of False Discreteness","domain_realization":"Treating every case within a workflow stage as equivalent can hide materially different trajectories or force arbitrary sub-stages that create unexplained cliffs."},{"archetype_element":"Granularity Choice","domain_realization":"Use case-level continuous trajectories only for record-supported variables and a limited set of discrete states tied to legally operative events."},{"archetype_element":"Step Boundary","domain_realization":"Each discrete transition requires a defined legal condition, effective timestamp, source artifact, and rule for disputed or corrected events."},{"archetype_element":"Continuity Assumption","domain_realization":"Interpolation is permitted only where record cadence supports it and no known procedural event, reporting gap, or shock interrupts the interval."},{"archetype_element":"Measurement Resolution","domain_realization":"Observation cadence and precision are displayed per variable; gaps remain explicit and cannot be converted silently into smooth trajectories."},{"archetype_element":"Hybrid Boundary Rule","domain_realization":"Continuous indicators may influence human priority only among actions permitted in the current discrete authority state; they cannot trigger a state transition themselves."},{"archetype_element":"Transition Validation","domain_realization":"Reviewers compare reconstructed transitions and trajectories with timestamped records, contested boundary cases, and actual supervisory reasoning."},{"archetype_element":"Approximation Error Check","domain_realization":"The review records whether smoothing missed a legal jump, discretization erased a material trajectory, or either representation changed an explanation or permissible priority decision."}],"title":"Hybrid Authority-State and Case-Trajectory Ledger for Enforcement Triage","version":0}