Provable Uncertainty Decomposition via Higher-Order Calibration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ahdritz, Gustaf, Gollakota, Aravind, Gopalan, Parikshit, Peale, Charlotte, Wieder, Udi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ahdritz, Gustaf
Gollakota, Aravind
Gopalan, Parikshit
Peale, Charlotte
Wieder, Udi
author_facet Ahdritz, Gustaf
Gollakota, Aravind
Gopalan, Parikshit
Peale, Charlotte
Wieder, Udi
contents We give a principled method for decomposing the predictive uncertainty of a model into aleatoric and epistemic components with explicit semantics relating them to the real-world data distribution. While many works in the literature have proposed such decompositions, they lack the type of formal guarantees we provide. Our method is based on the new notion of higher-order calibration, which generalizes ordinary calibration to the setting of higher-order predictors that predict mixtures over label distributions at every point. We show how to measure as well as achieve higher-order calibration using access to $k$-snapshots, namely examples where each point has $k$ independent conditional labels. Under higher-order calibration, the estimated aleatoric uncertainty at a point is guaranteed to match the real-world aleatoric uncertainty averaged over all points where the prediction is made. To our knowledge, this is the first formal guarantee of this type that places no assumptions whatsoever on the real-world data distribution. Importantly, higher-order calibration is also applicable to existing higher-order predictors such as Bayesian and ensemble models and provides a natural evaluation metric for such models. We demonstrate through experiments that our method produces meaningful uncertainty decompositions for image classification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18808
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provable Uncertainty Decomposition via Higher-Order Calibration
Ahdritz, Gustaf
Gollakota, Aravind
Gopalan, Parikshit
Peale, Charlotte
Wieder, Udi
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We give a principled method for decomposing the predictive uncertainty of a model into aleatoric and epistemic components with explicit semantics relating them to the real-world data distribution. While many works in the literature have proposed such decompositions, they lack the type of formal guarantees we provide. Our method is based on the new notion of higher-order calibration, which generalizes ordinary calibration to the setting of higher-order predictors that predict mixtures over label distributions at every point. We show how to measure as well as achieve higher-order calibration using access to $k$-snapshots, namely examples where each point has $k$ independent conditional labels. Under higher-order calibration, the estimated aleatoric uncertainty at a point is guaranteed to match the real-world aleatoric uncertainty averaged over all points where the prediction is made. To our knowledge, this is the first formal guarantee of this type that places no assumptions whatsoever on the real-world data distribution. Importantly, higher-order calibration is also applicable to existing higher-order predictors such as Bayesian and ensemble models and provides a natural evaluation metric for such models. We demonstrate through experiments that our method produces meaningful uncertainty decompositions for image classification.
title Provable Uncertainty Decomposition via Higher-Order Calibration
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18808