Fine-Grained Uncertainty Quantification via Collisions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Friedbaum, Jesse, Adiga, Sudarshan, Tandon, Ravi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Friedbaum, Jesse
Adiga, Sudarshan
Tandon, Ravi
author_facet Friedbaum, Jesse
Adiga, Sudarshan
Tandon, Ravi
contents We propose a new and intuitive metric for aleatoric uncertainty quantification (UQ), the prevalence of class collisions defined as the same input being observed in different classes. We use the rate of class collisions to define the collision matrix, a novel and uniquely fine-grained measure of uncertainty. For a classification problem involving $K$ classes, the $K\times K$ collision matrix $S$ measures the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between each pair of classes. We discuss several applications of the collision matrix, establish its fundamental mathematical properties, and show its relationship with existing UQ methods, including the Bayes error rate (BER). We also address the new problem of estimating the collision matrix using one-hot labeled data by proposing a series of innovative techniques to estimate $S$. First, we learn a pair-wise contrastive model which accepts two inputs and determines if they belong to the same class. We then show that this contrastive model (which is PAC learnable) can be used to estimate the row Gramian matrix of $S$, defined as $G=SS^T$. Finally, we show that under reasonable assumptions, $G$ can be used to uniquely recover $S$, a new result on non-negative matrices which could be of independent interest. With a method to estimate $S$ established, we demonstrate how this estimate of $S$, in conjunction with the contrastive model, can be used to estimate the posterior class probability distribution of any point. Experimental results are also presented to validate our methods of estimating the collision matrix and class posterior distributions on several datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_12127
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fine-Grained Uncertainty Quantification via Collisions
Friedbaum, Jesse
Adiga, Sudarshan
Tandon, Ravi
Machine Learning
Information Theory
Statistics Theory
We propose a new and intuitive metric for aleatoric uncertainty quantification (UQ), the prevalence of class collisions defined as the same input being observed in different classes. We use the rate of class collisions to define the collision matrix, a novel and uniquely fine-grained measure of uncertainty. For a classification problem involving $K$ classes, the $K\times K$ collision matrix $S$ measures the inherent difficulty in distinguishing between each pair of classes. We discuss several applications of the collision matrix, establish its fundamental mathematical properties, and show its relationship with existing UQ methods, including the Bayes error rate (BER). We also address the new problem of estimating the collision matrix using one-hot labeled data by proposing a series of innovative techniques to estimate $S$. First, we learn a pair-wise contrastive model which accepts two inputs and determines if they belong to the same class. We then show that this contrastive model (which is PAC learnable) can be used to estimate the row Gramian matrix of $S$, defined as $G=SS^T$. Finally, we show that under reasonable assumptions, $G$ can be used to uniquely recover $S$, a new result on non-negative matrices which could be of independent interest. With a method to estimate $S$ established, we demonstrate how this estimate of $S$, in conjunction with the contrastive model, can be used to estimate the posterior class probability distribution of any point. Experimental results are also presented to validate our methods of estimating the collision matrix and class posterior distributions on several datasets.
title Fine-Grained Uncertainty Quantification via Collisions
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12127