L0 paper

Paper and experiment workspace for PolicyEngine's L0 dataset-reduction work on the Populace stack.

This work is being prepared for presentation at IMA 2026 (Brussels), July 1, 2026: https://ima26.brussels/blog/presentation_maria_juaristi/.

The initial manuscript narrative was built in relation to the old PolicyEngine/policyengine-us-data paper draft. It remains LaTeX-first for now, with a Quarto entry point that includes the existing section files so the paper can be rendered and revised incrementally while the implementation moves to PolicyEngine/populace.

Layout

• paper/index.qmd - Quarto entry point for the paper.
• paper/main.tex - legacy LaTeX root copied from the prior draft.
• paper/sections/ - manuscript sections.
• paper/tables/ - generated/result tables included by the paper.
• paper/figures/ - figure outputs.
• paper/bibliography/references.bib - references.
• src/l0_paper/ - Python helpers for Populace-backed experiments.
• tests/ - tests that exercise the active Populace API surface.
• experiments/ - notebooks/configs/result scripts for paper experiments.

Development

This repo expects to be cloned next to PolicyEngine/populace:

PolicyEngine/
  l0-paper/
  populace/

The pyproject.toml points uv at the sibling Populace packages, so local tests use the active checkout rather than archived Microplex internals.

uv sync --all-extras --dev
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .

The smoke test runs a tiny populace.calibrate.calibrate(..., target_records=...) L0 calibration to verify the experiment repo is wired to Populace's implementation.

Render

Install Quarto, then run:

quarto render

The current local machine does not have Quarto installed. The legacy LaTeX source can still be checked with:

cd paper
latexmk -pdf main.tex

Compatibility Direction

New code in this repository should target active Populace APIs rather than archived microplex or microplex-us internals. The manuscript narrative has been migrated from the old Microplex wording to Populace; the archived repositories are referenced only as a migration reference.