What is a planted anomaly (a needle)?
A planted anomaly — Fictix calls it a needle — is a known mistake deliberately hidden in a company's books so you can measure whether software finds it.
Why plant mistakes on purpose
You can't measure a detector against data with unknown ground truth. If you plant the mistake, you know the right answer — so you can compute exactly what was caught and what was missed.
Kinds of needles
Common ones: the same bill paid twice, vendor/name mix-ups, a ghost employee on payroll, a miscategorised expense, a missing field, a wrong date, books that don't reconcile, and fraud-shaped patterns. Fictix records what it planted and where, then scores detection on precision and recall.
Questions
Why is it called a needle?
Because the job is finding a needle in the books — a single known mistake hidden in otherwise consistent data.
How is detection scored against needles?
Fictix knows every needle it planted, so it computes precision and recall on a product's findings, per scenario.