Estimating Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty with a Single Model

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Chan, Matthew A., Molina, Maria J., Metzler, Christopher A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866910687015469056
author Chan, Matthew A.
Molina, Maria J.
Metzler, Christopher A.
author_facet Chan, Matthew A.
Molina, Maria J.
Metzler, Christopher A.
contents Estimating and disentangling epistemic uncertainty, uncertainty that is reducible with more training data, and aleatoric uncertainty, uncertainty that is inherent to the task at hand, is critically important when applying machine learning to high-stakes applications such as medical imaging and weather forecasting. Conditional diffusion models' breakthrough ability to accurately and efficiently sample from the posterior distribution of a dataset now makes uncertainty estimation conceptually straightforward: One need only train and sample from a large ensemble of diffusion models. Unfortunately, training such an ensemble becomes computationally intractable as the complexity of the model architecture grows. In this work we introduce a new approach to ensembling, hyper-diffusion models (HyperDM), which allows one to accurately estimate both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty with a single model. Unlike existing single-model uncertainty methods like Monte-Carlo dropout and Bayesian neural networks, HyperDM offers prediction accuracy on par with, and in some cases superior to, multi-model ensembles. Furthermore, our proposed approach scales to modern network architectures such as Attention U-Net and yields more accurate uncertainty estimates compared to existing methods. We validate our method on two distinct real-world tasks: x-ray computed tomography reconstruction and weather temperature forecasting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03478
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty with a Single Model
Chan, Matthew A.
Molina, Maria J.
Metzler, Christopher A.
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Estimating and disentangling epistemic uncertainty, uncertainty that is reducible with more training data, and aleatoric uncertainty, uncertainty that is inherent to the task at hand, is critically important when applying machine learning to high-stakes applications such as medical imaging and weather forecasting. Conditional diffusion models' breakthrough ability to accurately and efficiently sample from the posterior distribution of a dataset now makes uncertainty estimation conceptually straightforward: One need only train and sample from a large ensemble of diffusion models. Unfortunately, training such an ensemble becomes computationally intractable as the complexity of the model architecture grows. In this work we introduce a new approach to ensembling, hyper-diffusion models (HyperDM), which allows one to accurately estimate both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty with a single model. Unlike existing single-model uncertainty methods like Monte-Carlo dropout and Bayesian neural networks, HyperDM offers prediction accuracy on par with, and in some cases superior to, multi-model ensembles. Furthermore, our proposed approach scales to modern network architectures such as Attention U-Net and yields more accurate uncertainty estimates compared to existing methods. We validate our method on two distinct real-world tasks: x-ray computed tomography reconstruction and weather temperature forecasting.
title Estimating Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty with a Single Model
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03478