30,989 research outputs found
Binary Classifier Calibration using an Ensemble of Near Isotonic Regression Models
Learning accurate probabilistic models from data is crucial in many practical
tasks in data mining. In this paper we present a new non-parametric calibration
method called \textit{ensemble of near isotonic regression} (ENIR). The method
can be considered as an extension of BBQ, a recently proposed calibration
method, as well as the commonly used calibration method based on isotonic
regression. ENIR is designed to address the key limitation of isotonic
regression which is the monotonicity assumption of the predictions. Similar to
BBQ, the method post-processes the output of a binary classifier to obtain
calibrated probabilities. Thus it can be combined with many existing
classification models. We demonstrate the performance of ENIR on synthetic and
real datasets for the commonly used binary classification models. Experimental
results show that the method outperforms several common binary classifier
calibration methods. In particular on the real data, ENIR commonly performs
statistically significantly better than the other methods, and never worse. It
is able to improve the calibration power of classifiers, while retaining their
discrimination power. The method is also computationally tractable for large
scale datasets, as it is time, where is the number of
samples
Estimating Uncertainty Online Against an Adversary
Assessing uncertainty is an important step towards ensuring the safety and
reliability of machine learning systems. Existing uncertainty estimation
techniques may fail when their modeling assumptions are not met, e.g. when the
data distribution differs from the one seen at training time. Here, we propose
techniques that assess a classification algorithm's uncertainty via calibrated
probabilities (i.e. probabilities that match empirical outcome frequencies in
the long run) and which are guaranteed to be reliable (i.e. accurate and
calibrated) on out-of-distribution input, including input generated by an
adversary. This represents an extension of classical online learning that
handles uncertainty in addition to guaranteeing accuracy under adversarial
assumptions. We establish formal guarantees for our methods, and we validate
them on two real-world problems: question answering and medical diagnosis from
genomic data
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