prediction interval
Scalable and adaptive prediction bands with kernel sum-of-squares
Conformal Prediction (CP) is a popular framework for constructing prediction bands with valid coverage in finite samples, while being free of any distributional assumption. A well-known limitation of conformal prediction is the lack of adaptivity, although several works introduced practically efficient alternate procedures. In this work, we build upon recent ideas that rely on recasting the CP problem as a statistical learning problem, directly targeting coverage and adaptivity. This statistical learning problem is based on reproducible kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) and kernel sum-of-squares (SoS) methods. First, we extend previous results with a general representer theorem and exhibit the dual formulation of the learning problem.
STACI: Spatio-Temporal Aleatoric Conformal Inference
Fitting Gaussian Processes (GPs) provides interpretable aleatoric uncertainty quantification for estimation of spatio-temporal fields. Spatio-temporal deep learning models, while scalable, typically assume a simplistic independent covariance matrix for the response, failing to capture the underlying correlation structure. However, spatio-temporal GPs suffer from issues of scalability and various forms of approximation bias resulting from restrictive assumptions of the covariance kernel function. We propose STACI, a novel framework consisting of a variational Bayesian neural network approximation of non-stationary spatio-temporal GP along with a novel spatio-temporal conformal inference algorithm. STACI is highly scalable, taking advantage of GPU training capabilities for neural network models, and provides statistically valid prediction intervals for uncertainty quantification. STACI outperforms competing GPs and deep methods in accurately approximating spatio-temporal processes and we show it easily scales to datasets with millions of observations.
Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Regression using Contextualised Normalizing Flows
Quantifying uncertainty in deep regression models is important both for understanding the confidence of the model and for safe decision-making in high-risk domains. Existing approaches that yield prediction intervals overlook distributional information, neglecting the effect of multimodal or asymmetric distributions on decision-making.
Statistical Inference for Gradient Boosting Regression
Gradient boosting is widely popular due to its flexibility and predictive accuracy. However, statistical inference and uncertainty quantification for gradient boosting remain challenging and under-explored. We propose a unified framework for statistical inference in gradient boosting regression. Our framework integrates dropout or parallel training with a recently proposed regularization procedure called Boulevard that allows for a central limit theorem (CLT) for boosting. With these enhancements, we surprisingly find that increasing the dropout rate and the number of trees grown in parallel at each iteration substantially enhances signal recovery and overall performance. Our resulting algorithms enjoy similar CLTs, which we use to construct built-in confidence intervals, prediction intervals, and rigorous hypothesis tests for assessing variable importance in only O(nd2) time with the Nystr om method. Numerical experiments verify the asymptotic normality and demonstrate that our algorithms perform well, do not require early stopping, interpolate between regularized boosting and random forests, and confirm the validity of their built-in statistical inference procedures.
Conformal Prediction for Time-series Forecasting with Change Points
Conformal prediction has been explored as a general and efficient way to provide uncertainty quantification for time series. However, current methods struggle to handle time series data with change points -- sudden shifts in the underlying data-generating process. In this paper, we propose a novel Conformal Prediction for Time-series with Change points (CPTC) algorithm, addressing this gap by integrating a model to predict the underlying state with online conformal prediction to model uncertainties in non-stationary time series. We prove CPTC's validity and improved adaptivity in the time series setting under minimum assumptions, and demonstrate CPTC's practical effectiveness on 6 synthetic and real-world datasets, showing improved validity and adaptivity compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Regression using Contextualised Normalizing Flows
Quantifying uncertainty in deep regression models is important both for understanding the confidence of the model and for safe decision-making in high-risk domains. Existing approaches that yield prediction intervals overlook distributional information, neglecting the effect of multimodal or asymmetric distributions on decision-making.
CASCADE Conformal Prediction: Uncertainty-Adaptive Prediction Intervals for Two-Stage Clinical Decision Support
Diaz-Rincon, Ricardo, Liang, Muxuan, Ramirez-Zamora, Adolfo, Shickel, Benjamin
Effective medication management in Parkinson's Disease (PD) is challenging due to heterogeneous disease progression, variable patient response, and medication side effects. While AI models can forecast levodopa equivalent daily dose (LEDD) as a measure of medication needs, standard uncertainty quantification often fails to communicate the reliability of these predictions, treating high and low confidence clinical decisions identically. We introduce CASCADE (Calibrated Adaptive Scaling via Conformal And Distributional Estimation), a novel conformal prediction framework that propagates epistemic uncertainty from a screening classifier to adapt downstream predictions. Unlike standard conformal methods that rely on auxiliary residual regression, we leverage epistemic uncertainty from a primary classification task (identifying whether a medication change is needed) to dynamically scale the prediction intervals of a secondary regression task (predicting how much change). By mapping Venn-Abers multi-probabilistic uncertainty directly to non-conformity scores, our framework achieves continuous risk adaptation. We demonstrate that this ``cascade effect'' produces highly efficient intervals for confident patients (38.9% narrower than standard conformal baselines) while automatically expanding intervals to ensure robust coverage for uncertain cases, bridging the gap between discrete clinical decision-making and continuous dose forecasting in PD.
Skew-adaptive conformal prediction
F., Paulo C. Marques, Graziadei, Helton
We develop a skew-adaptive extension of split conformal prediction for regression. The method starts from an asymmetric interval family centered at a point prediction and uses the gauge approach to deduce the conformity score induced by this family. The inverse hyperbolic sine transform of signed scaled residuals provides the training target for an additional predictive model, whose role is to learn how predictive uncertainty should tilt across the feature space. The resulting procedure preserves the finite-sample marginal validity of split conformal prediction under exchangeability, while producing intervals that adapt to both local scale and local skewness. We also develop a calibration-sample-based estimator for comparing the expected relative future width of the skew-adaptive and classical scaled-score intervals. Experiments on a variety of datasets indicate gains in prediction interval efficiency over the scaled-score construction and conformalized quantile regression, and show that the proposed estimator closely matches the corresponding average width ratio observed on the test sample.
Multi-Fidelity Quantile Regression
High-fidelity (HF) data are often expensive to collect and therefore scarce, making conditional quantiles difficult to estimate accurately. We propose a two-stage, model-agnostic method for multi-fidelity quantile regression. The central idea is a local quantile link: at each covariate value, the HF quantile is represented as a low-fidelity (LF) quantile evaluated at a covariate-dependent level. This reformulation reduces the problem to estimating the level function, which can be smoother than the HF quantile itself when the LF and HF conditional distributions have similar shapes. We also study the complementary regime in which this advantage weakens and introduce a correction step to improve robustness. Our theory characterizes when the proposed estimator converges faster than direct quantile regression using HF data alone and when the correction step provides further improvement. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that our method yields more accurate quantile estimates and tighter conformal prediction intervals.
Conformalized Percentile Interval: Finite Sample Validity and Improved Conditional Performance
Zou, Ran, Zhu, Wanrong, Nan, Bin
Conformal prediction provides distribution-free predictive intervals with finite-sample marginal coverage. However, achieving conditional validity and interval efficiency (in terms of short interval length) remains challenging, particularly in complex settings with heteroskedasticity, skewed responses, or estimation errors. We propose a conformal-style calibration method for responses obtained by the probability integral transform (PIT) of the conditional cumulative distribution function (CDF) estimated via neural networks to construct a finite-sample-adjusted percentile interval with the shortest length determined by the estimated conditional CDF. Calibrating in PIT space is effective because PIT values are asymptotically feature-independent when the CDF estimator is accurate, which mitigates feature-dependent miscoverage and improves conditional calibration. On the other hand, our percentile calibration adapts to the empirical PIT distribution, which is robust against a possibly imperfect estimation of the conditional CDF. We prove the finite-sample marginal coverage property of the proposed method and show its asymptotic conditional coverage under mild consistency conditions. Experiments on diverse synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate better conditional calibration and substantially shorter intervals than existing methods.