Engression: Extrapolation through the Lens of Distributional Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shen, Xinwei, Meinshausen, Nicolai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Shen, Xinwei
Meinshausen, Nicolai
author_facet Shen, Xinwei
Meinshausen, Nicolai
contents Distributional regression aims to estimate the full conditional distribution of a target variable, given covariates. Popular methods include linear and tree-ensemble based quantile regression. We propose a neural network-based distributional regression methodology called `engression'. An engression model is generative in the sense that we can sample from the fitted conditional distribution and is also suitable for high-dimensional outcomes. Furthermore, we find that modelling the conditional distribution on training data can constrain the fitted function outside of the training support, which offers a new perspective to the challenging extrapolation problem in nonlinear regression. In particular, for `pre-additive noise' models, where noise is added to the covariates before applying a nonlinear transformation, we show that engression can successfully perform extrapolation under some assumptions such as monotonicity, whereas traditional regression approaches such as least-squares or quantile regression fall short under the same assumptions. Our empirical results, from both simulated and real data, validate the effectiveness of the engression method and indicate that the pre-additive noise model is typically suitable for many real-world scenarios. The software implementations of engression are available in both R and Python.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_00835
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Engression: Extrapolation through the Lens of Distributional Regression
Shen, Xinwei
Meinshausen, Nicolai
Methodology
Machine Learning
Distributional regression aims to estimate the full conditional distribution of a target variable, given covariates. Popular methods include linear and tree-ensemble based quantile regression. We propose a neural network-based distributional regression methodology called `engression'. An engression model is generative in the sense that we can sample from the fitted conditional distribution and is also suitable for high-dimensional outcomes. Furthermore, we find that modelling the conditional distribution on training data can constrain the fitted function outside of the training support, which offers a new perspective to the challenging extrapolation problem in nonlinear regression. In particular, for `pre-additive noise' models, where noise is added to the covariates before applying a nonlinear transformation, we show that engression can successfully perform extrapolation under some assumptions such as monotonicity, whereas traditional regression approaches such as least-squares or quantile regression fall short under the same assumptions. Our empirical results, from both simulated and real data, validate the effectiveness of the engression method and indicate that the pre-additive noise model is typically suitable for many real-world scenarios. The software implementations of engression are available in both R and Python.
title Engression: Extrapolation through the Lens of Distributional Regression
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00835