
Data leakage affected 294 published papers across 17 scientific fields (Kapoor & Narayanan, 2023); a living survey has since grown that count to 648 across 30 fields. The dominant response has been documentation: checklists, linters, best-practice guides. Documentation reduces errors but does not close structural failures. This paper proposes a structural remedy: a grammar that decomposes the supervised learning lifecycle into 8 kernel primitives connected by a typed directed acyclic graph (DAG), with four hard constraints that reject the two most damaging leakage classes at call time. The grammar's core contribution is the terminal assess constraint: a runtime-enforced evaluate/assess boundary where repeated test-set assessment is rejected by a guard on a nominally distinct Evidence type. A companion study across 2,047 experimental instances quantifies why this matters: selection leakage inflates performance by d_z = 0.93 and memorization leakage by d_z = 0.53–1.11. Two maintained implementations (Python, R) demonstrate the claims. The appendix specification lets anyone build a conforming version.
machine learning, data leakage, type system, workflow grammar, reproducibility, supervised learning
machine learning, data leakage, type system, workflow grammar, reproducibility, supervised learning
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 0 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
