Merging uncertainty sets via majority vote

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gasparin, Matteo, Ramdas, Aaditya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gasparin, Matteo
Ramdas, Aaditya
author_facet Gasparin, Matteo
Ramdas, Aaditya
contents Given $K$ uncertainty sets that are arbitrarily dependent -- for example, confidence intervals for an unknown parameter obtained with $K$ different estimators, or prediction sets obtained via conformal prediction based on $K$ different algorithms on shared data -- we address the question of how to efficiently combine them in a black-box manner to produce a single uncertainty set. We present a simple and broadly applicable majority vote procedure that produces a merged set with nearly the same error guarantee as the input sets. We then extend this core idea in a few ways: we show that weighted averaging can be a powerful way to incorporate prior information, and a simple randomization trick produces strictly smaller merged sets without altering the coverage guarantee. Further improvements can be obtained if the sets are exchangeable. We also show that many modern methods, like split conformal prediction, median of means, HulC and cross-fitted ``double machine learning'', can be effectively derandomized using these ideas.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_09379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Merging uncertainty sets via majority vote
Gasparin, Matteo
Ramdas, Aaditya
Methodology
Given $K$ uncertainty sets that are arbitrarily dependent -- for example, confidence intervals for an unknown parameter obtained with $K$ different estimators, or prediction sets obtained via conformal prediction based on $K$ different algorithms on shared data -- we address the question of how to efficiently combine them in a black-box manner to produce a single uncertainty set. We present a simple and broadly applicable majority vote procedure that produces a merged set with nearly the same error guarantee as the input sets. We then extend this core idea in a few ways: we show that weighted averaging can be a powerful way to incorporate prior information, and a simple randomization trick produces strictly smaller merged sets without altering the coverage guarantee. Further improvements can be obtained if the sets are exchangeable. We also show that many modern methods, like split conformal prediction, median of means, HulC and cross-fitted ``double machine learning'', can be effectively derandomized using these ideas.
title Merging uncertainty sets via majority vote
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09379