aod-external-positioning

Research

Use when writing or reviewing anything that positions Area Occupancy Detection (AOD) against the rest of the Home Assistant ecosystem — README claims, release notes, "how is this different from X" answers, comparisons to HA core's bayesian platform or Bermuda/ESPresense, or any statement that a feature is "novel", "state of the art", or "proven". Also load before approving a PR description or doc page that cites accuracy/precision numbers, or before answering "is adjacency validated on real homes yet".

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AOD External Positioning

What this covers

Where AOD actually sits in the HA ecosystem today (2026-07-06), which of its mechanisms are genuinely novel vs. commodity, the house standard for what evidence a claim needs before it goes in README/release notes, and the four maintainer-stated "beyond SOTA" ambitions with what each would require to claim externally. This is the skill for outward-facing claims — what you may say about AOD to the world, and what you may not say yet.

When NOT to use this

For the actual open research questions (what to build/measure next on prior and likelihood learning), use aod-research-frontier and aod-learning-accuracy-campaign instead. For internal architecture facts (how the sigmoid pipeline actually computes), use aod-architecture-contract or bayesian-occupancy-reference. This skill is about positioning claims, not implementation.

1. What AOD actually is (verified facts)

Fact	Value	Verified
Distribution	HACS custom integration (not HA core)	`hacs.json`: `render_readme`, `zip_release: true`, `filename: area_occupancy.zip`
Stars	308	`gh repo view Hankanman/Area-Occupancy-Detection --json stargazerCount`
Min HA version declared	2024.8.0	`hacs.json`: `"homeassistant": "2024.8.0"`
HA version actually tested against	2026.7.1	`pyproject.toml` pins `homeassistant==2026.7.1` (dependency refresh, PR #496, merged 2026-07-06)
Docs site	`hankanman.github.io/Area-Occupancy-Detection/`	`gh repo view` `homepageUrl`
Release scheme	CalVer `YYYY.M.N` (not the SemVer CLAUDE.md's release section describes)	`gh release list`, e.g. `2026.5.17`

Do not describe AOD as "part of Home Assistant" or "an HA core feature" — it is a third-party custom component installed via HACS, competing/complementing core's own primitives (see §2).

2. Ecosystem position: competitors and complements

Project	Relationship	Key difference
Raw motion sensor + automation timeout	Commodity baseline AOD replaces	Binary on/off, no context, no learning; README's own comparison table (README.md lines 26-32) is the canonical framing to reuse
HA core `binary_sensor.bayesian` platform	Same math family, different product	See §3 below — do not claim "we invented Bayesian occupancy in HA," core already ships it
Template sensors / Jinja groups	Commodity AOD replaces	README's "Replace Dozens of Templates and Groups" framing (README.md line ~19)
Bermuda BLE trilateration (`agittins/bermuda`)	Complementary, active collaboration thread	Issue #25 (opened 2025-03-01, oldest open roadmap issue, labels `on roadmap`+`enhancement`). Bermuda's maintainer (`agittins`) posted directly on #25 (2025-10-24) that Bermuda plans to add per-area `OCCUPANCY`-device-class boolean entities so users can pick "use for occupancy" per tracked BLE device — once that ships, those entities are a natural additional binary input to AOD, not a replacement for it. As of 2026-07-06 this integration point does not exist yet on either side — do not describe BLE/Bermuda ingestion as shipped. AOD's own README "Planned Features" lists "Location Aware: Leveraging BLE, WiFi, GPS" (README.md line 104) as future work, unimplemented.
ESPresense-style room-presence (WiFi/BLE RSSI room inference)	Complementary, same category as Bermuda	Not yet integrated; same "future input signal" status as Bermuda

House rule: when asked to compare AOD to Bermuda/ESPresense, say they are complementary location/trilateration signal sources AOD does not yet consume, not competitors to be dismissed — the maintainer has an open, friendly upstream thread (#25), not a rivalry.

3. Novel vs. commodity, as of 2026-07-06

Commodity — already exists in HA core or elsewhere, don't oversell:

Naive-Bayes sensor fusion itself. HA core's bayesian binary_sensor platform (home-assistant.io/integrations/bayesian/) already combines a user-specified prior with per-observation prob_given_true/ prob_given_false via Bayes' rule to produce a posterior against a threshold. AOD's core probability pipeline is a superset in mechanism, not in kind: it uses a sigmoid/logit-space combination (sigmoid_probability in utils.py), not the log-odds accumulator naive-Bayes core uses — but the underlying idea ("combine sensor states probabilistically instead of boolean AND/OR") is the same idea core already ships. The real differentiators are what feeds the model (below), not the existence of Bayesian fusion. Do not write "AOD brings Bayesian probability to Home Assistant" — core already has that. Write "AOD's fusion model is learned and time-aware where core's bayesian platform requires the user to hand-specify every prior and likelihood statically in YAML with no history, no decay, and no per-sensor auto-tuning."

Genuinely novel (as a combination; verify each claim's current merge state before citing) — the differentiators to lead with:

Learned time-of-week priors from recorder history. 168 (day-of-week × hour-of-day) buckets per area, computed from actual recorder history via the hourly analysis pipeline, DST-safe (walks in UTC, buckets by local wall-clock). Nothing hand-configured. This is on main today.
Purpose-based decay semantics. Per-area "purpose" (bedroom, office, kitchen, passageway, etc.) drives default half-life and floor/threshold behavior automatically, including a sleep/wake half-life split for bedrooms — a room-type-aware decay model, not a single global timeout. On main today (though see aod-failure-archaeology for the recurring custom-vs-default-value bug class in this exact mechanism — #439/#440, #481/#493).
Wasp-in-Box. Virtual sensor purpose-built for single-entry/exit rooms (bathrooms) where motion sensors can't see the whole space: door-close with no motion still holds high occupancy. On main today.
Adjacency / transition learning (learned neighbor influence). Learns room-to-room transition probabilities from observed history (not a hand-tuned "if kitchen occupied, boost dining room by X%" static rule) and applies both a Bayesian logit-space boost and a decay-half-life stretch to neighboring areas. This is PR #454 — merged 2026-07-06, now on main (squash merge, main HEAD 17b71d2). It directly answers community discussion #431 (a user request for exactly this feature, unanswered by the requester's own suggested static-config approach — AOD's design instead learns influence from data).

No-oversell rule for #4 specifically: every constant driving the adjacency boost/decay-modifier math (ADJACENCY_BOOST_GAIN=0.5, ADJACENCY_DECAY_MODIFIER_GAIN=0.75, ADJACENCY_DECAY_MODIFIER_MAX=1.75, the four ADJACENCY_N_* smoothing-fallback minimum-observation thresholds) carries the exact in-repo comment (const.py lines 190-191): "First-pass values; tune from real data once Phase 3 is collecting transitions." There is no real-household validation of these numbers anywhere in the repo — no recorder-derived accuracy measurement exists for the adjacency feature at all (the test suite uses synthetic/mocked entities only). Label adjacency "candidate" / "unvalidated on real homes," not "proven" or "state of the art," in any external-facing writing until the learning-accuracy campaign (see aod-learning-accuracy-campaign) produces a real measurement.

4. The house standard for publishing a claim

Before README, release notes, or any external doc states a quantitative claim, it must meet the bar set by PR #486 (the diagnostic-sensor-precision fix) — this is the canonical "how we prove a change worked" example in this project's own history:

Measured on a live 6-area installation (v2026.5.17, 57 AOD entities): Afternoon (active) baseline 15,952 recorder rows/3h → Evening 7,058 rows/3h (−55%) → Morning 3,323 rows/3h (−79%).

What made that claim publishable (verify against gh pr view 486 — do not paraphrase from memory):

Real installation, not synthetic fixture data — "live 6-area installation," named HA version and entity count.
Explicit method — what was measured (recorder row count), over what window (3h), under what condition (time-of-day activity level), against what baseline (precision=2, the pre-change default).
Before/after with a stated delta, not just an after-number.
A stated mechanism for why the effect is real, not coincidental (the PR explains why precision-0 reduces rows: sub-decimal noise is quantized away while genuine decay-driven whole-percent transitions still record).

Checklist for any new external claim:

Measured against a real (or explicitly-labeled synthetic) dataset — name which
States the exact metric, window, and baseline compared against
Gives a before/after delta, not a single absolute number
Explains the causal mechanism, not just correlation
Cites the PR/issue number it came from, so a future session can gh pr view it
Does not claim something is "solved"/"validated" when the repo shows it as unmerged or unvalidated — check merge state first

If a claim doesn't clear this bar, it stays internal (research-frontier / learning-accuracy-campaign territory) — do not promote it to README or release notes yet.

5. Reproducibility bar for any published comparison

Any comparison of AOD's accuracy/behavior against a prior version, a competitor, or a baseline (raw motion sensor, HA core bayesian) must specify, at minimum:

AOD version (the manifest.json/pyproject.toml/const.py DEVICE_SW_VERSION triplet — see aod-change-control for why these three must move together).
Data source: real recorder history from a named install (household size/area count, like PR #486's "6-area installation, 57 entities") vs. synthetic fixtures (config/configuration.yaml's 5-room mock rig) — never blur the two. A synthetic-fixture result is a sanity check, not an accuracy claim.
Sample size: this project's own internal bar for trusting a learned correlation is MIN_CORRELATION_SAMPLES = 50 (const.py:323 on main as of 2026-07-06; line drifts by branch — grep -n MIN_CORRELATION_SAMPLES custom_components/area_occupancy/const.py) — any external accuracy comparison with fewer than 50 underlying observations per area/sensor should be labeled preliminary, not a result.
The exact metric (precision/recall on occupied-interval detection, recorder-row count, false-repair rate, etc.) with its formula or query spelled out well enough that a future session could recompute it from the same DB (config/.storage/area_occupancy.db) — see aod-proof-and-analysis-toolkit for the actual measurement tools (scripts/visualize_distributions.py, the run_analysis service + simulator).
What's held constant: same purpose/threshold/decay config across the before/after, unless the config change itself is the thing being measured.

6. The four SOTA ambitions and what each needs externally

The maintainer named these four as what "beyond SOTA" means for this project. None are claimable externally yet on today's evidence — each needs a specific kind of proof first:

Ambition	What it means	What must be true before you claim it publicly
Reliability king (primary)	AOD's occupancy calls are more trustworthy than raw motion/naive automations across real, messy households — this is the maintainer's stated #1 priority	A multi-household measured comparison (precision/recall or false-trigger rate) of AOD vs. a documented naive-motion-sensor baseline, using the PR #486-standard method (§4). No such measurement exists in the repo today — this is the single most important gap; see `aod-learning-accuracy-campaign`
Learned-model research	Priors/likelihoods/adjacency learned from data, not hand-tuned, is a research contribution worth publishing/citing	Needs a written methodology (sampling, validation split, real-household data) that survives scrutiny — not just "we learn from history" as a slogan. The current adjacency tunables are explicitly first-pass/unvalidated (§3) — this ambition is blocked on the same accuracy-measurement gap as reliability king
HA-core quality	Code quality, test coverage, config-migration discipline on par with what HA core requires of built-in integrations	Concretely measurable today: 85% coverage gate (`pyproject.toml`, enforced by `scripts/test`), full type annotations, Google-style docstrings, ruff-enforced style (see `aod-build-and-env`) — this ambition is the closest to already being true and is the easiest to defend externally with a number (current coverage %, run `scripts/test` to reverify)
Predictive occupancy	Not just detecting current occupancy but predicting near-future occupancy/transitions (the adjacency trajectory work is a first step toward this)	Needs an explicit prediction-vs-outcome evaluation (e.g., "predicted transition to area X within N minutes, did it happen") — no such evaluation exists yet; adjacency's trajectory tracking computes a boost signal, not a scored prediction, so today's code is an ingredient, not a demonstrated predictive-occupancy result

None of these four should appear in README/release notes as accomplished facts. They are legitimate direction statements (roadmap language is fine: "working toward reliability across real households") but any "we are the most reliable/most predictive" framing needs the measurement described in §4-5 first.

Provenance and maintenance

Date-stamped 2026-07-06 (post-merge), integration version 2026.5.17 (pyproject.toml line 7 / manifest.json line 20 / const.py DEVICE_SW_VERSION) — note the integration's tagged release version has not moved past 2026.5.17 yet, so "shipped in release" language should still say "merged to main, not yet in a tagged release." PRs #454 (adjacent-areas), #491, #492, #493, #494 were merged 2026-07-06 (squash merges) — main HEAD is now 17b71d2. Re-verify merge state before citing any of their content as shipped if working from an older checkout.

Re-verification commands, by volatile fact category:

Star count / repo metadata: gh repo view Hankanman/Area-Occupancy-Detection --json stargazerCount,description,homepageUrl
Adjacent-areas / PR #454 merge state (merged 2026-07-06; reconfirm on an older checkout): gh pr view 454 --json state,mergedAt
Same-day bugfix PRs #491-494 merge state (all merged 2026-07-06): gh pr view 491 492 493 494 --json state,mergedAt (run each individually; gh pr view takes one number at a time)
Bermuda thread #25 latest status: gh issue view 25 --json state,comments,labels
Adjacency tunables / "first-pass" disclaimer still present: grep -n "First-pass values" custom_components/area_occupancy/const.py
PR #486 measured numbers (15,952/7,058/3,323 rows, −55%/−79%): gh pr view 486 --json body
HA core bayesian platform current behavior: fetch https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/bayesian/ (external, may change independent of this repo)
Current release version / CalVer scheme: gh release list --limit 5
Coverage gate percentage: grep -n "fail_under\|fail-under" pyproject.toml; confirm live number via scripts/test
MIN_CORRELATION_SAMPLES threshold: grep -n "MIN_CORRELATION_SAMPLES" custom_components/area_occupancy/const.py