Non-Exchangeable Conformal Risk Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Farinhas, António, Zerva, Chrysoula, Ulmer, Dennis, Martins, André F. T.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Farinhas, António
Zerva, Chrysoula
Ulmer, Dennis
Martins, André F. T.
author_facet Farinhas, António
Zerva, Chrysoula
Ulmer, Dennis
Martins, André F. T.
contents Split conformal prediction has recently sparked great interest due to its ability to provide formally guaranteed uncertainty sets or intervals for predictions made by black-box neural models, ensuring a predefined probability of containing the actual ground truth. While the original formulation assumes data exchangeability, some extensions handle non-exchangeable data, which is often the case in many real-world scenarios. In parallel, some progress has been made in conformal methods that provide statistical guarantees for a broader range of objectives, such as bounding the best $F_1$-score or minimizing the false negative rate in expectation. In this paper, we leverage and extend these two lines of work by proposing non-exchangeable conformal risk control, which allows controlling the expected value of any monotone loss function when the data is not exchangeable. Our framework is flexible, makes very few assumptions, and allows weighting the data based on its relevance for a given test example; a careful choice of weights may result on tighter bounds, making our framework useful in the presence of change points, time series, or other forms of distribution drift. Experiments with both synthetic and real world data show the usefulness of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_01262
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-Exchangeable Conformal Risk Control
Farinhas, António
Zerva, Chrysoula
Ulmer, Dennis
Martins, André F. T.
Machine Learning
Split conformal prediction has recently sparked great interest due to its ability to provide formally guaranteed uncertainty sets or intervals for predictions made by black-box neural models, ensuring a predefined probability of containing the actual ground truth. While the original formulation assumes data exchangeability, some extensions handle non-exchangeable data, which is often the case in many real-world scenarios. In parallel, some progress has been made in conformal methods that provide statistical guarantees for a broader range of objectives, such as bounding the best $F_1$-score or minimizing the false negative rate in expectation. In this paper, we leverage and extend these two lines of work by proposing non-exchangeable conformal risk control, which allows controlling the expected value of any monotone loss function when the data is not exchangeable. Our framework is flexible, makes very few assumptions, and allows weighting the data based on its relevance for a given test example; a careful choice of weights may result on tighter bounds, making our framework useful in the presence of change points, time series, or other forms of distribution drift. Experiments with both synthetic and real world data show the usefulness of our method.
title Non-Exchangeable Conformal Risk Control
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01262