Semi-Supervised Hypothesis Testing by Betting on Predictions

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Tenzer, Yaniv, Tolochinsky, Elad, Romano, Yaniv
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866913168264003584
author Tenzer, Yaniv
Tolochinsky, Elad
Romano, Yaniv
author_facet Tenzer, Yaniv
Tolochinsky, Elad
Romano, Yaniv
contents We introduce a testing-by-betting framework that leverages predictions on unlabeled data to enhance the power of sequential hypothesis testing. Given limited samples from the joint distribution of $(X,Y)$, and additional unlabeled samples from the marginal of $X$, we ask how unlabeled data can be used to hypothesize about the distribution of $Y$, and the conditional distribution of $Y\mid X$. We introduce an e-statistic and use it to construct a sequential test. Under standard distributional assumptions -- label shift or concept shift -- we establish that the test is anytime valid. Furthermore, we show that for binary data, the e-statistic has non-trivial power. Crucially, our approach retains these properties even when the underlying predictions are inaccurate. Through simulations and applications to large language models evaluation, we demonstrate power gains over baseline approaches, including prediction-powered inference. These gains persist even with relatively limited unlabeled data and when predictions have low accuracy due to weak correlation between $X$ and $Y$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28533
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semi-Supervised Hypothesis Testing by Betting on Predictions
Tenzer, Yaniv
Tolochinsky, Elad
Romano, Yaniv
Machine Learning
We introduce a testing-by-betting framework that leverages predictions on unlabeled data to enhance the power of sequential hypothesis testing. Given limited samples from the joint distribution of $(X,Y)$, and additional unlabeled samples from the marginal of $X$, we ask how unlabeled data can be used to hypothesize about the distribution of $Y$, and the conditional distribution of $Y\mid X$. We introduce an e-statistic and use it to construct a sequential test. Under standard distributional assumptions -- label shift or concept shift -- we establish that the test is anytime valid. Furthermore, we show that for binary data, the e-statistic has non-trivial power. Crucially, our approach retains these properties even when the underlying predictions are inaccurate. Through simulations and applications to large language models evaluation, we demonstrate power gains over baseline approaches, including prediction-powered inference. These gains persist even with relatively limited unlabeled data and when predictions have low accuracy due to weak correlation between $X$ and $Y$.
title Semi-Supervised Hypothesis Testing by Betting on Predictions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28533