Heteroscedastic Neural Networks for Path Loss Prediction with Link-Specific Uncertainty

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1. Verfasser: Ethier, Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ethier, Jonathan
author_facet Ethier, Jonathan
contents Traditional and modern machine learning-based path loss models typically assume a constant prediction variance. We propose a neural network that jointly predicts the mean and link-specific variance by minimizing a Gaussian negative log-likelihood, enabling heteroscedastic uncertainty estimates. We compare shared, partially shared, and independent-parameter architectures using accuracy, calibration, and sharpness metrics on blind test sets from large public RF drive-test datasets. The shared-parameter architecture performs best, achieving an RMSE of 7.4 dB, 95.1 percent coverage for 95 percent prediction intervals, and a mean interval width of 29.6 dB. These uncertainty estimates further support link-specific coverage margins, improve RF planning and interference analyses, and provide effective self-diagnostics of model weaknesses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_23243
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Heteroscedastic Neural Networks for Path Loss Prediction with Link-Specific Uncertainty
Ethier, Jonathan
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Traditional and modern machine learning-based path loss models typically assume a constant prediction variance. We propose a neural network that jointly predicts the mean and link-specific variance by minimizing a Gaussian negative log-likelihood, enabling heteroscedastic uncertainty estimates. We compare shared, partially shared, and independent-parameter architectures using accuracy, calibration, and sharpness metrics on blind test sets from large public RF drive-test datasets. The shared-parameter architecture performs best, achieving an RMSE of 7.4 dB, 95.1 percent coverage for 95 percent prediction intervals, and a mean interval width of 29.6 dB. These uncertainty estimates further support link-specific coverage margins, improve RF planning and interference analyses, and provide effective self-diagnostics of model weaknesses.
title Heteroscedastic Neural Networks for Path Loss Prediction with Link-Specific Uncertainty
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23243