Calibration Bands for Mean Estimates within the Exponential Dispersion Family

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Delong, Łukasz, Gatti, Selim, Wüthrich, Mario V.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Delong, Łukasz
Gatti, Selim
Wüthrich, Mario V.
author_facet Delong, Łukasz
Gatti, Selim
Wüthrich, Mario V.
contents A statistical model is said to be calibrated if the resulting mean estimates perfectly match the true means of the underlying responses. Aiming for calibration is often not achievable in practice as one has to deal with finite samples of noisy observations. A weaker notion of calibration is auto-calibration. An auto-calibrated model satisfies that the expected value of the responses for a given mean estimate matches this estimate. Testing for autocalibration has only been considered recently in the literature and we propose a new approach based on calibration bands. Calibration bands denote a set of lower and upper bounds such that the probability that the true means lie simultaneously inside those bounds exceeds some given confidence level. Such bands were constructed by Yang-Barber (2019) for sub-Gaussian distributions. Dimitriadis et al. (2023) then introduced narrower bands for the Bernoulli distribution. We use the same idea in order to extend the construction to the entire exponential dispersion family that contains for example the binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, gamma and normal distributions. Moreover, we show that the obtained calibration bands allow us to construct various tests for calibration and auto-calibration, respectively. As the construction of the bands does not rely on asymptotic results, we emphasize that our tests can be used for any sample size.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_18896
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Calibration Bands for Mean Estimates within the Exponential Dispersion Family
Delong, Łukasz
Gatti, Selim
Wüthrich, Mario V.
Statistics Theory
Applications
Machine Learning
62P05 (Primary), 62G10 (Secondary), 91G05, 60E05
G.3
A statistical model is said to be calibrated if the resulting mean estimates perfectly match the true means of the underlying responses. Aiming for calibration is often not achievable in practice as one has to deal with finite samples of noisy observations. A weaker notion of calibration is auto-calibration. An auto-calibrated model satisfies that the expected value of the responses for a given mean estimate matches this estimate. Testing for autocalibration has only been considered recently in the literature and we propose a new approach based on calibration bands. Calibration bands denote a set of lower and upper bounds such that the probability that the true means lie simultaneously inside those bounds exceeds some given confidence level. Such bands were constructed by Yang-Barber (2019) for sub-Gaussian distributions. Dimitriadis et al. (2023) then introduced narrower bands for the Bernoulli distribution. We use the same idea in order to extend the construction to the entire exponential dispersion family that contains for example the binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, gamma and normal distributions. Moreover, we show that the obtained calibration bands allow us to construct various tests for calibration and auto-calibration, respectively. As the construction of the bands does not rely on asymptotic results, we emphasize that our tests can be used for any sample size.
title Calibration Bands for Mean Estimates within the Exponential Dispersion Family
topic Statistics Theory
Applications
Machine Learning
62P05 (Primary), 62G10 (Secondary), 91G05, 60E05
G.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18896