I35h. SCIENTIFIC NOVELTY AND METHODOLOGICAL POSITION OF A9DDC

A9DDC — Added Discriminatory Capacity — was proposed within the Vitology research programme as a methodological construct for testing whether a candidate quantity or feature carries additional discriminatory or predictive information relative to a predefined baseline. However, comparison of Model A with Model A + X, incremental validity, added predictive value, reclassification analysis, conditional variable importance, negative controls, preregistration, robustness analysis, external validation, and independent replication all have established methodological precedents [1–12]. The use of these components therefore cannot, by itself, establish the scientific novelty of A9DDC. The present work performs a structured scientific subtraction of prior methodological components and separates established prior art from the part of A9DDC that, after such subtraction, retains the status of candidate novelty. A central distinction is proposed: Observed Increment ≠ Confirmed Residual Informational Novelty within a predefined scope. The concept of Residual Informational Novelty is introduced and denoted as: RIN(X | B, C), where X is the candidate information, B is the predefined baseline, and C is the predefined context and validation conditions. Within the corpus of sources examined in this work, no complete functional analogue was identified that simultaneously matches A9DDC in both its central object of inference and the combined sequence of its key evidential transitions. This finding does not establish absolute scientific priority. A9DDC therefore retains the status of a candidate metric-agnostic evidential architecture requiring further systematic prior-art review, prospective validation, and independent methodological assessment.