Distribution-free inference with hierarchical data

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lee, Yonghoon, Barber, Rina Foygel, Willett, Rebecca
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Lee, Yonghoon
Barber, Rina Foygel
Willett, Rebecca
author_facet Lee, Yonghoon
Barber, Rina Foygel
Willett, Rebecca
contents This paper studies distribution-free inference in settings where the data set has a hierarchical structure -- for example, groups of observations, or repeated measurements. In such settings, standard notions of exchangeability may not hold. To address this challenge, a hierarchical form of exchangeability is derived, facilitating extensions of distribution-free methods, including conformal prediction and jackknife+. While the standard theoretical guarantee obtained by the conformal prediction framework is a marginal predictive coverage guarantee, in the special case of independent repeated measurements, it is possible to achieve a stronger form of coverage -- the "second-moment coverage" property -- to provide better control of conditional miscoverage rates, and distribution-free prediction sets that achieve this property are constructed. Simulations illustrate that this guarantee indeed leads to uniformly small conditional miscoverage rates. Empirically, this stronger guarantee comes at the cost of a larger width of the prediction set in scenarios where the fitted model is poorly calibrated, but this cost is very mild in cases where the fitted model is accurate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_06342
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distribution-free inference with hierarchical data
Lee, Yonghoon
Barber, Rina Foygel
Willett, Rebecca
Statistics Theory
Methodology
This paper studies distribution-free inference in settings where the data set has a hierarchical structure -- for example, groups of observations, or repeated measurements. In such settings, standard notions of exchangeability may not hold. To address this challenge, a hierarchical form of exchangeability is derived, facilitating extensions of distribution-free methods, including conformal prediction and jackknife+. While the standard theoretical guarantee obtained by the conformal prediction framework is a marginal predictive coverage guarantee, in the special case of independent repeated measurements, it is possible to achieve a stronger form of coverage -- the "second-moment coverage" property -- to provide better control of conditional miscoverage rates, and distribution-free prediction sets that achieve this property are constructed. Simulations illustrate that this guarantee indeed leads to uniformly small conditional miscoverage rates. Empirically, this stronger guarantee comes at the cost of a larger width of the prediction set in scenarios where the fitted model is poorly calibrated, but this cost is very mild in cases where the fitted model is accurate.
title Distribution-free inference with hierarchical data
topic Statistics Theory
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06342