Aggregating Conformal Prediction Sets via α-Allocation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xu, Congbin, Yu, Yue, Ren, Haojie, Wang, Zhaojun, Zou, Changliang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915620065378304
author Xu, Congbin
Yu, Yue
Ren, Haojie
Wang, Zhaojun
Zou, Changliang
author_facet Xu, Congbin
Yu, Yue
Ren, Haojie
Wang, Zhaojun
Zou, Changliang
contents Conformal prediction offers a distribution-free framework for constructing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage. Yet, efficiently leveraging multiple conformity scores to reduce prediction set size remains a major open challenge. Instead of selecting a single best score, this work introduces a principled aggregation strategy, COnfidence-Level Allocation (COLA), that optimally allocates confidence levels across multiple conformal prediction sets to minimize empirical set size while maintaining provable coverage. Two variants are further developed, COLA-s and COLA-f, which guarantee finite-sample marginal coverage via sample splitting and full conformalization, respectively. In addition, we develop COLA-l, an individualized allocation strategy that promotes local size efficiency while achieving asymptotic conditional coverage. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that COLA achieves considerably smaller prediction sets than state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining valid coverage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12065
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Aggregating Conformal Prediction Sets via α-Allocation
Xu, Congbin
Yu, Yue
Ren, Haojie
Wang, Zhaojun
Zou, Changliang
Methodology
Machine Learning
Conformal prediction offers a distribution-free framework for constructing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage. Yet, efficiently leveraging multiple conformity scores to reduce prediction set size remains a major open challenge. Instead of selecting a single best score, this work introduces a principled aggregation strategy, COnfidence-Level Allocation (COLA), that optimally allocates confidence levels across multiple conformal prediction sets to minimize empirical set size while maintaining provable coverage. Two variants are further developed, COLA-s and COLA-f, which guarantee finite-sample marginal coverage via sample splitting and full conformalization, respectively. In addition, we develop COLA-l, an individualized allocation strategy that promotes local size efficiency while achieving asymptotic conditional coverage. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that COLA achieves considerably smaller prediction sets than state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining valid coverage.
title Aggregating Conformal Prediction Sets via α-Allocation
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12065