From conformal to probabilistic prediction

This paper proposes a new method of probabilistic prediction, which is based on conformal prediction. The method is applied to the standard USPS data set and gives encouraging results.Comment: 12 pages, 2 table

Efficiency of conformalized ridge regression

Conformal prediction is a method of producing prediction sets that can be applied on top of a wide range of prediction algorithms. The method has a guaranteed coverage probability under the standard IID assumption regardless of whether the assumptions (often considerably more restrictive) of the underlying algorithm are satisfied. However, for the method to be really useful it is desirable that in the case where the assumptions of the underlying algorithm are satisfied, the conformal predictor loses little in efficiency as compared with the underlying algorithm (whereas being a conformal predictor, it has the stronger guarantee of validity). In this paper we explore the degree to which this additional requirement of efficiency is satisfied in the case of Bayesian ridge regression; we find that asymptotically conformal prediction sets differ little from ridge regression prediction intervals when the standard Bayesian assumptions are satisfied.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Multiple Testing Framework for Out-of-Distribution Detection

We study the problem of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection, that is, detecting whether a learning algorithm's output can be trusted at inference time. While a number of tests for OOD detection have been proposed in prior work, a formal framework for studying this problem is lacking. We propose a definition for the notion of OOD that includes both the input distribution and the learning algorithm, which provides insights for the construction of powerful tests for OOD detection. We propose a multiple hypothesis testing inspired procedure to systematically combine any number of different statistics from the learning algorithm using conformal p-values. We further provide strong guarantees on the probability of incorrectly classifying an in-distribution sample as OOD. In our experiments, we find that threshold-based tests proposed in prior work perform well in specific settings, but not uniformly well across different types of OOD instances. In contrast, our proposed method that combines multiple statistics performs uniformly well across different datasets and neural networks

Agreeing to Stop: Reliable Latency-Adaptive Decision Making via Ensembles of Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are recurrent models that can leverage sparsity in input time series to efficiently carry out tasks such as classification. Additional efficiency gains can be obtained if decisions are taken as early as possible as a function of the complexity of the input time series. The decision on when to stop inference and produce a decision must rely on an estimate of the current accuracy of the decision. Prior work demonstrated the use of conformal prediction (CP) as a principled way to quantify uncertainty and support adaptive-latency decisions in SNNs. In this paper, we propose to enhance the uncertainty quantification capabilities of SNNs by implementing ensemble models for the purpose of improving the reliability of stopping decisions. Intuitively, an ensemble of multiple models can decide when to stop more reliably by selecting times at which most models agree that the current accuracy level is sufficient. The proposed method relies on different forms of information pooling from ensemble models, and offers theoretical reliability guarantees. We specifically show that variational inference-based ensembles with p-variable pooling significantly reduce the average latency of state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining reliability guarantees.Comment: Under revie

Conformal Inference for Invariant Risk Minimization

The application of machine learning models can be significantly impeded by the occurrence of distributional shifts, as the assumption of homogeneity between the population of training and testing samples in machine learning and statistics may not be feasible in practical situations. One way to tackle this problem is to use invariant learning, such as invariant risk minimization (IRM), to acquire an invariant representation that aids in generalization with distributional shifts. This paper develops methods for obtaining distribution-free prediction regions to describe uncertainty estimates for invariant representations, accounting for the distribution shifts of data from different environments. Our approach involves a weighted conformity score that adapts to the specific environment in which the test sample is situated. We construct an adaptive conformal interval using the weighted conformity score and prove its conditional average under certain conditions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct several numerical experiments, including simulation studies and a practical example using real-world data.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2209.1135

Offline Policy Evaluation with Out-of-Sample Guarantees

We consider the problem of evaluating the performance of a decision policy using past observational data. The outcome of a policy is measured in terms of a loss or disutility (or negative reward) and the problem is to draw valid inferences about the out-of-sample loss of the specified policy when the past data is observed under a, possibly unknown, policy. Using a sample-splitting method, we show that it is possible to draw such inferences with finite-sample coverage guarantees that evaluate the entire loss distribution. Importantly, the method takes into account model misspecifications of the past policy -- including unmeasured confounding. The evaluation method can be used to certify the performance of a policy using observational data under an explicitly specified range of credible model assumptions

Conformal Risk Control

We extend conformal prediction to control the expected value of any monotone loss function. The algorithm generalizes split conformal prediction together with its coverage guarantee. Like conformal prediction, the conformal risk control procedure is tight up to an $\mathcal{O}(1/n)$ factor. Worked examples from computer vision and natural language processing demonstrate the usage of our algorithm to bound the false negative rate, graph distance, and token-level F1-score.Comment: Code available at https://github.com/aangelopoulos/conformal-ris