Glossary
Score Volatility
The degree to which an AI agent's trust score fluctuates over time, indicating consistency or instability in performance.
What is Score Volatility?
Score volatility measures how much trust scores change period to period. High volatility indicates inconsistent performance where agents swing between strong and weak outcomes, making them unpredictable and risky for critical applications. Low volatility reflects stable, consistent performance that builds confidence in reliability.
Volatility can stem from various sources including inconsistent agent quality, environmental variability, workload sensitivity, or insufficient smoothing in the scoring algorithm. Analyzing volatility patterns helps identify root causes and informs trust decisions, as volatile agents may require more conservative trust thresholds.
Example
Agent A maintains scores between 780-790 with low volatility, while Agent B fluctuates between 720-820 with high volatility despite similar average scores. For critical applications requiring predictable performance, Agent A is preferred despite Agent B occasionally achieving higher peaks.
How Signet addresses this
Signet tracks score volatility as a meta-metric informing overall trust assessment. High volatility may indicate stability concerns, affecting the Stability dimension score and increasing confidence interval width to reflect uncertainty about agent performance.
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