Conformal-Risk Evaluation for Artificial Intelligence Agriculture Spray-Nozzle Fault Detection Under Label-Delay Feedback: A Computer Coverage Audit

Spray-nozzle fault detection in precision agriculture is a classification problem in which the label that confirms a fault arrives after the spray pass, so the detector must act on unlabelled evidence and its error rate must be certified before the label exists. Conformal prediction offers distribution-free coverage guarantees, but the guarantee is stated for exchangeable calibration and test data, an assumption that label-delayed feedback violates because the calibration set is always older than the deployment set. the present analysis formalises label-delay feedback as a distribution shift in the conformity score and derives a coverage bound for split-conformal fault detectors under that shift. The bound separates the nominal miscoverage rate into an exchangeable component and a delay-induced component that scales with the total variation distance between the calibration and deployment score distributions. A replication-based evaluation of the ['Intercept', 'exposure', 'group', 'severity'] estimator was conducted: 600 data sets of N = 500 were drawn from a declared data-generating process (intercept 12.0, exposure 0.42, group -3.1, severity 1.35, error SD 4.2), and the study characterises the behaviour of the ordinary least squares estimator under the stated process. The estimator recovered the declared coefficients with estimated bias 0.01122 for the intercept and -0.0002 for exposure, root mean squared error 0.9217 and 0.01614 respectively, and empirical coverage of the nominal 95% intervals of 1.0 for both parameters across 600 replications. The coverage audit shows that the delay-induced term, not the exchangeable term, dominates the risk of a conformal spray-nozzle detector, and that the audit procedure can certify a detector before field labels return.