Blind-Spot Mass: A Good-Turing Framework for Quantifying Deployment Coverage Risk in Machine Learning Systems
Blind-spot mass is a Good-Turing framework for quantifying deployment coverage risk in machine learning. In modern ML systems, operational state distributions are often heavy-tailed, implying that a long tail of valid but rare states is structurally under-supported in finite training and evaluation data. This creates a form of 'coverage blindness': models can appear accurate on standard test sets yet remain unreliable across large regions of the deployment state space. We propose blind-spot mass B_n(tau), a deployment metric estimating the total probability mass assigned to states whose empirical support falls below a threshold tau. B_n(tau) is computed using Good-Turing unseen-species estimation and yields a principled estimate of how much of the operational distribution lies in reliability-critical, under-supported regimes. We further derive a coverage-imposed accuracy ceiling, decomposing overall performance into supported and blind components and separating capacity limits from data limits. We validate the framework in wearable human activity recognition (HAR) using wrist-worn inertial data. We then replicate the same analysis in the MIMIC-IV hospital database with 275 admissions, where the blind-spot mass curve converges to the same 95% at tau = 5 across clinical state abstractions. This replication across structurally independent domains - differing in modality, feature space, label space, and application - shows that blind-spot mass is a general ML methodology for quantifying combinatorial coverage risk, not an application-specific artifact. Blind-spot decomposition identifies which activities or clinical regimes dominate risk, providing actionable guidance for industrial practitioners on targeted data collection, normalization/renormalization, and physics- or domain-informed constraints for safer deployment.