When Sensors Fail: Coverage Auditing with Incomplete Sensor Records

Chung-I Huang, Wen-Yi Chang

Sensor outages can conceal prediction-interval coverage deficits behind acceptable marginal performance, while unavailable future readings leave some issued forecasts unscorable. We present a measurement-record audit that links issue-time outage duration, original target availability, and time-uniform statistical evidence. The audit retains complete forecast keys, batches all sensors and overlapping horizons at each measurement tick, and projects simultaneous covered-count and scored-count bounds onto a cumulative conditional expected coverage ratio. This target is distinguished from empirical coverage and outage-conditional population coverage. Selected traffic and air-quality results illustrate the gap between pooled and long-outage coverage; in METR-LA, only 7.6% of issued long-gap forecasts have originally observed targets. Of 30 primary sequential outage-state audits, 26 are inconclusive and four lack scored support. This concise presentation gives the core construction and selected aggregate evidence without the full experimental supplement.