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Main Authors: Hagos, Misgina Tsighe, Suutala, Antti, Bychkov, Dmitrii, Kücükel, Hakan, von Bahr, Joar, Poceviciute, Milda, Lundin, Johan, Linder, Nina, Lundström, Claes
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08845
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author Hagos, Misgina Tsighe
Suutala, Antti
Bychkov, Dmitrii
Kücükel, Hakan
von Bahr, Joar
Poceviciute, Milda
Lundin, Johan
Linder, Nina
Lundström, Claes
author_facet Hagos, Misgina Tsighe
Suutala, Antti
Bychkov, Dmitrii
Kücükel, Hakan
von Bahr, Joar
Poceviciute, Milda
Lundin, Johan
Linder, Nina
Lundström, Claes
contents Deep learning based cervical cancer classification can potentially increase access to screening in low-resource regions. However, deep learning models are often overconfident and do not reliably reflect diagnostic uncertainty. Moreover, they are typically optimized to generate maximum-likelihood predictions, which fail to convey uncertainty or ambiguity in their results. Such challenges can be addressed using conformal prediction, a model-agnostic framework for generating prediction sets that contain likely classes for trained deep-learning models. The size of these prediction sets indicates model uncertainty, contracting as model confidence increases. However, existing conformal prediction evaluation primarily focuses on whether the prediction set includes or covers the true class, often overlooking the presence of extraneous classes. We argue that prediction sets should be truthful and valuable to end users, ensuring that the listed likely classes align with human expectations rather than being overly relaxed and including false positives or unlikely classes. In this study, we comprehensively validate conformal prediction sets using expert annotation sets collected from multiple annotators. We evaluate three conformal prediction approaches applied to three deep-learning models trained for cervical atypia classification. Our expert annotation-based analysis reveals that conventional coverage-based evaluations overestimate performance and that current conformal prediction methods often produce prediction sets that are not well aligned with human labels. Additionally, we explore the capabilities of the conformal prediction methods in identifying ambiguous and out-of-distribution data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08845
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Validation of Conformal Prediction in Cervical Atypia Classification
Hagos, Misgina Tsighe
Suutala, Antti
Bychkov, Dmitrii
Kücükel, Hakan
von Bahr, Joar
Poceviciute, Milda
Lundin, Johan
Linder, Nina
Lundström, Claes
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Deep learning based cervical cancer classification can potentially increase access to screening in low-resource regions. However, deep learning models are often overconfident and do not reliably reflect diagnostic uncertainty. Moreover, they are typically optimized to generate maximum-likelihood predictions, which fail to convey uncertainty or ambiguity in their results. Such challenges can be addressed using conformal prediction, a model-agnostic framework for generating prediction sets that contain likely classes for trained deep-learning models. The size of these prediction sets indicates model uncertainty, contracting as model confidence increases. However, existing conformal prediction evaluation primarily focuses on whether the prediction set includes or covers the true class, often overlooking the presence of extraneous classes. We argue that prediction sets should be truthful and valuable to end users, ensuring that the listed likely classes align with human expectations rather than being overly relaxed and including false positives or unlikely classes. In this study, we comprehensively validate conformal prediction sets using expert annotation sets collected from multiple annotators. We evaluate three conformal prediction approaches applied to three deep-learning models trained for cervical atypia classification. Our expert annotation-based analysis reveals that conventional coverage-based evaluations overestimate performance and that current conformal prediction methods often produce prediction sets that are not well aligned with human labels. Additionally, we explore the capabilities of the conformal prediction methods in identifying ambiguous and out-of-distribution data.
title Validation of Conformal Prediction in Cervical Atypia Classification
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08845