Goto

Collaborating Authors

 nonconformity measure


Certainty in Uncertainty: Reasoning over Uncertain Knowledge Graphs with Statistical Guarantees

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Uncertain knowledge graph embedding (UnKGE) methods learn vector representations that capture both structural and uncertainty information to predict scores of unseen triples. However, existing methods produce only point estimates, without quantifying predictive uncertainty-limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications where understanding confidence in predictions is crucial. To address this limitation, we propose \textsc{UnKGCP}, a framework that generates prediction intervals guaranteed to contain the true score with a user-specified level of confidence. The length of the intervals reflects the model's predictive uncertainty. \textsc{UnKGCP} builds on the conformal prediction framework but introduces a novel nonconformity measure tailored to UnKGE methods and an efficient procedure for interval construction. We provide theoretical guarantees for the intervals and empirically verify these guarantees. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks across diverse UnKGE methods further demonstrate that the intervals are sharp and effectively capture predictive uncertainty.


A Systematic Review of Conformal Inference Procedures for Treatment Effect Estimation: Methods and Challenges

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Treatment effect estimation is essential for informed decision-making in many fields such as healthcare, economics, and public policy. While flexible machine learning models have been widely applied for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, quantifying the inherent uncertainty of their point predictions remains an issue. Recent advancements in conformal prediction address this limitation by allowing for inexpensive computation, as well as distribution shifts, while still providing frequentist, finite-sample coverage guarantees under minimal assumptions for any point-predictor model. This advancement holds significant potential for improving decision-making in especially high-stakes environments. In this work, we perform a systematic review regarding conformal prediction methods for treatment effect estimation and provide for both the necessary theoretical background. Through a systematic filtering process, we select and analyze eleven key papers, identifying and describing current state-of-the-art methods in this area. Based on our findings, we propose directions for future research.


Classification with Reject Option: Distribution-free Error Guarantees via Conformal Prediction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) models always make a prediction, even when they are likely to be wrong. This causes problems in practical applications, as we do not know if we should trust a prediction. ML with reject option addresses this issue by abstaining from making a prediction if it is likely to be incorrect. In this work, we formalise the approach to ML with reject option in binary classification, deriving theoretical guarantees on the resulting error rate. This is achieved through conformal prediction (CP), which produce prediction sets with distribution-free validity guarantees. In binary classification, CP can output prediction sets containing exactly one, two or no labels. By accepting only the singleton predictions, we turn CP into a binary classifier with reject option. Here, CP is formally put in the framework of predicting with reject option. We state and prove the resulting error rate, and give finite sample estimates. Numerical examples provide illustrations of derived error rate through several different conformal prediction settings, ranging from full conformal prediction to offline batch inductive conformal prediction. The former has a direct link to sharp validity guarantees, whereas the latter is more fuzzy in terms of validity guarantees but can be used in practice. Error-reject curves illustrate the trade-off between error rate and reject rate, and can serve to aid a user to set an acceptable error rate or reject rate in practice.


Predicate-Conditional Conformalized Answer Sets for Knowledge Graph Embeddings

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Uncertainty quantification in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods is crucial for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. A recent work applies conformal prediction to KGE methods, providing uncertainty estimates by generating a set of answers that is guaranteed to include the true answer with a predefined confidence level. However, existing methods provide probabilistic guarantees averaged over a reference set of queries and answers (marginal coverage guarantee). In high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, a stronger guarantee is often required: the predicted sets must provide consistent coverage per query (conditional coverage guarantee). We propose CondKGCP, a novel method that approximates predicate-conditional coverage guarantees while maintaining compact prediction sets. CondKGCP merges predicates with similar vector representations and augments calibration with rank information. We prove the theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirical effectiveness of CondKGCP by comprehensive evaluations.


Bridging conformal prediction and scenario optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conformal prediction and scenario optimization constitute two important classes of statistical learning frameworks to certify decisions made using data. They have found numerous applications in control theory, machine learning and robotics. Despite intense research in both areas, and apparently similar results, a clear connection between these two frameworks has not been established. By focusing on the so-called vanilla conformal prediction, we show rigorously how to choose appropriate score functions and set predictor map to recover well-known bounds on the probability of constraint violation associated with scenario programs. We also show how to treat ranking of nonconformity scores as a one-dimensional scenario program with discarded constraints, and use such connection to recover vanilla conformal prediction guarantees on the validity of the set predictor. We also capitalize on the main developments of the scenario approach, and show how we could analyze calibration conditional conformal prediction under this lens. Our results establish a theoretical bridge between conformal prediction and scenario optimization.


Target Strangeness: A Novel Conformal Prediction Difficulty Estimator

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces Target Strangeness, a novel difficulty estimator for conformal prediction (CP) that offers an alternative approach for normalizing prediction intervals (PIs). By assessing how atypical a prediction is within the context of its nearest neighbours' target distribution, Target Strangeness can surpass the current state-of-the-art performance. This novel difficulty estimator is evaluated against others in the context of several conformal regression experiments.


CONFINE: Conformal Prediction for Interpretable Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Deep neural networks exhibit remarkable performance, yet their black-box nature limits their utility in fields like healthcare where interpretability is crucial. Existing explainability approaches often sacrifice accuracy and lack quantifiable measures of prediction uncertainty. In this study, we introduce Conformal Prediction for Interpretable Neural Networks (CONFINE), a versatile framework that generates prediction sets with statistically robust uncertainty estimates instead of point predictions to enhance model transparency and reliability. CONFINE not only provides example-based explanations and confidence estimates for individual predictions but also boosts accuracy by up to 3.6%. We define a new metric, correct efficiency, to evaluate the fraction of prediction sets that contain precisely the correct label and show that CONFINE achieves correct efficiency of up to 3.3% higher than the original accuracy, matching or exceeding prior methods. CONFINE's marginal and class-conditional coverages attest to its validity across tasks spanning medical image classification to language understanding. Being adaptable to any pre-trained classifier, CONFINE marks a significant advance towards transparent and trustworthy deep learning applications in critical domains.


Reliable Prediction Intervals with Regression Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper proposes an extension to conventional regression Neural Networks (NNs) for replacing the point predictions they produce with prediction intervals that satisfy a required level of confidence. Our approach follows a novel machine learning framework, called Conformal Prediction (CP), for assigning reliable confidence measures to predictions without assuming anything more than that the data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). We evaluate the proposed method on four benchmark datasets and on the problem of predicting Total Electron Content (TEC), which is an important parameter in trans-ionospheric links; for the latter we use a dataset of more than 60000 TEC measurements collected over a period of 11 years. Our experimental results show that the prediction intervals produced by our method are both well-calibrated and tight enough to be useful in practice.


Well-calibrated Confidence Measures for Multi-label Text Classification with a Large Number of Labels

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We extend our previous work on Inductive Conformal Prediction (ICP) for multi-label text classification and present a novel approach for addressing the computational inefficiency of the Label Powerset (LP) ICP, arrising when dealing with a high number of unique labels. We present experimental results using the original and the proposed efficient LP-ICP on two English and one Czech language data-sets. Specifically, we apply the LP-ICP on three deep Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifiers of two types: one based on contextualised (bert) and two on non-contextualised (word2vec) word-embeddings. In the LP-ICP setting we assign nonconformity scores to label-sets from which the corresponding p-values and prediction-sets are determined. Our approach deals with the increased computational burden of LP by eliminating from consideration a significant number of label-sets that will surely have p-values below the specified significance level. This reduces dramatically the computational complexity of the approach while fully respecting the standard CP guarantees. Our experimental results show that the contextualised-based classifier surpasses the non-contextualised-based ones and obtains state-of-the-art performance for all data-sets examined. The good performance of the underlying classifiers is carried on to their ICP counterparts without any significant accuracy loss, but with the added benefits of ICP, i.e. the confidence information encapsulated in the prediction sets. We experimentally demonstrate that the resulting prediction sets can be tight enough to be practically useful even though the set of all possible label-sets contains more than $1e+16$ combinations. Additionally, the empirical error rates of the obtained prediction-sets confirm that our outputs are well-calibrated.


Guaranteed Coverage Prediction Intervals with Gaussian Process Regression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is a popular regression method, which unlike most Machine Learning techniques, provides estimates of uncertainty for its predictions. These uncertainty estimates however, are based on the assumption that the model is well-specified, an assumption that is violated in most practical applications, since the required knowledge is rarely available. As a result, the produced uncertainty estimates can become very misleading; for example the prediction intervals (PIs) produced for the 95\% confidence level may cover much less than 95\% of the true labels. To address this issue, this paper introduces an extension of GPR based on a Machine Learning framework called, Conformal Prediction (CP). This extension guarantees the production of PIs with the required coverage even when the model is completely misspecified. The proposed approach combines the advantages of GPR with the valid coverage guarantee of CP, while the performed experimental results demonstrate its superiority over existing methods.