{
  "slug": "failure-label",
  "term": "Failure label",
  "aliases": [
    "failure target"
  ],
  "definition": "A failure label is a recorded outcome assigned to an observation under an explicit rule defining which event counts as failure and when it occurs.",
  "note": "Specify the event, counting unit and timestamp. Lu et al. use the operator's disk replacement decision after failed I/O and unsuccessful restart. [lu-fast20] Narya instead targets customer-impacting host failures later attributed to hardware faults; a permanent component failure can occur later. [levy-osdi20]",
  "limitations": [
    {
      "text": "A replacement record is not automatically a physical failure or a service outage; changing the target changes the prediction task.",
      "citationIds": [
        "lu-fast20",
        "levy-osdi20"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "prediction-horizon",
    "temporal-validation",
    "grouped-cross-validation",
    "smart",
    "right-censoring"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "lu-fast20",
      "title": "Lu et al. Making Disk Failure Predictions SMARTer! FAST 2020, section 2.1, p. 153.",
      "url": "https://www.usenix.org/system/files/fast20-lu.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-14"
    },
    {
      "id": "levy-osdi20",
      "title": "Levy et al. Predictive and Adaptive Failure Mitigation to Avert Production Cloud VM Interruptions. OSDI 2020, section 4.3 and Figure 2, p. 1159.",
      "url": "https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-levy.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-10-14"
    }
  ],
  "status": "shipping",
  "advantages": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-10-14"
}