Valid State Transition Framework: Prespecified Event-Level Adjudication of Stabilized Outcomes

Valid State Transition Framework (VSTF): Prespecified Event-Level Adjudication of Stabilized Outcomes Background and Objective Scientific and engineering measurements frequently quantify activity, signal changes or detected events without establishing whether these observations represent valid, distinguishable and durable outcomes. This manuscript introduces the Valid State Transition Framework (VSTF), a prespecified methodological framework for evaluating when a candidate transition should be accepted as a scientifically valid stabilized state change rather than transient activity or an unresolved event. Methodological Framework VSTF combines operational state localization, measurement-system distinguishability, event-level retention, domain-specific validity and explicit rules for censoring and event adjudication. Candidate events are classified as accepted, rejected, pending or non-adjudicable. Claims involving energy efficiency or other normalized costs additionally require a complete accounting of the relevant system boundary and denominator. The framework specifies mathematical definitions, observable quantities, uncertainty requirements, reference-event matching, reproducibility procedures and criteria for evaluating the stability of conclusions under alternative thresholds and measurement conditions. Empirical Evaluation The principal empirical application is an author-declared, analysis-locked retrospective evaluation of 681,960,203 official Backblaze drive-day records. At the prespecified operating point, VSTF increased the precision of 30-day failure warnings relative to a raw-positive rule: 2024: from 3.396% to 10.369%. 2025: from 2.365% to 7.486%. The analysis also reported a reduction in false-warning burden exceeding 70%. A secondary paired comparison against a localization-only rule showed smaller precision improvements accompanied by reductions in sensitivity. An exploratory model-aware comparator achieved slightly higher precision point estimates, indicating that universal predictive superiority of VSTF has not been established. A complementary descriptive analysis of six public bearing runs examined trajectory-level separation and retention properties. Scientific Contribution The central contribution is an auditable, cross-domain protocol for distinguishing raw activity and candidate state changes from accepted, retained and operationally valid outcomes. The framework is intended to support transparent event accounting, reproducible benchmarking and carefully bounded claims across reliability engineering, computational systems and other fields involving dynamical state transitions. Limitations and Research Status VSTF is a proposed methodological framework, not a new universal physical law or an independently adopted technical standard. The reported Backblaze evaluation relies on operational failure labels rather than independently adjudicated mechanical-failure ground truth. The results do not establish clinical utility, causal mechanisms, universal applicability or superiority over optimized predictive models under matched sensitivity. Further independent validation is required to establish transportability and practical value in additional application domains.