Confidence on the Focal: Conformal Prediction with Selection-Conditional Coverage

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jin, Ying, Ren, Zhimei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jin, Ying
Ren, Zhimei
author_facet Jin, Ying
Ren, Zhimei
contents Conformal prediction builds marginally valid prediction intervals that cover the unknown outcome of a randomly drawn test point with a prescribed probability. However, in practice, data-driven methods are often used to identify specific test unit(s) of interest, requiring uncertainty quantification tailored to these focal units. In such cases, marginally valid conformal prediction intervals may fail to provide valid coverage for the focal unit(s) due to selection bias. This paper presents a general framework for constructing a prediction set with finite-sample exact coverage, conditional on the unit being selected by a given procedure. The general form of our method accommodates arbitrary selection rules that are invariant to the permutation of the calibration units, and generalizes Mondrian Conformal Prediction to multiple test units and non-equivariant classifiers. We also work out computationally efficient implementation of our framework for a number of realistic selection rules, including top-K selection, optimization-based selection, selection based on conformal p-values, and selection based on properties of preliminary conformal prediction sets. The performance of our methods is demonstrated via applications in drug discovery and health risk prediction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_03868
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Confidence on the Focal: Conformal Prediction with Selection-Conditional Coverage
Jin, Ying
Ren, Zhimei
Methodology
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
Conformal prediction builds marginally valid prediction intervals that cover the unknown outcome of a randomly drawn test point with a prescribed probability. However, in practice, data-driven methods are often used to identify specific test unit(s) of interest, requiring uncertainty quantification tailored to these focal units. In such cases, marginally valid conformal prediction intervals may fail to provide valid coverage for the focal unit(s) due to selection bias. This paper presents a general framework for constructing a prediction set with finite-sample exact coverage, conditional on the unit being selected by a given procedure. The general form of our method accommodates arbitrary selection rules that are invariant to the permutation of the calibration units, and generalizes Mondrian Conformal Prediction to multiple test units and non-equivariant classifiers. We also work out computationally efficient implementation of our framework for a number of realistic selection rules, including top-K selection, optimization-based selection, selection based on conformal p-values, and selection based on properties of preliminary conformal prediction sets. The performance of our methods is demonstrated via applications in drug discovery and health risk prediction.
title Confidence on the Focal: Conformal Prediction with Selection-Conditional Coverage
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03868