quantile loss
Isotonic Survival Regression: Calibrated Survival Distributions from Deep Cox Models
Jain, Anchit, Zhang, Kevin, Bates, Stephen
Time-to-event data is widespread across the life sciences and engineering, but it is typically encountered together with censoring, which complicates the application of standard machine learning methods. Deep Cox models have emerged as a popular method for analyzing time-to-event data because they gracefully handle censoring and can be used with unstructured data such as clinical text reports, genomic sequences, and pathology images. However, their predicted survival probabilities are often poorly calibrated, thus limiting their practical utility. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc calibration method for Deep Cox models that uses isotonic regression to refine predicted survival probabilities without affecting discriminative power. We establish favorable theoretical guarantees, including a double-robustness property and asymptotic calibration. Experiments on synthetic and real-world clinical data demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our method.
ConquerNet: Convolution-Smoothed Quantile ReLU Neural Networks with Minimax Guarantees
Luo, Tianpai, Wu, Fangwei, Wu, Weichi
Quantile regression is a fundamental tool for distributional learning but poses significant optimization challenges for deep models due to the non-smoothness of the pinball loss. We propose ConquerNet, a class of \textbf{con}volution-smoothed \textbf{qu}antil\textbf{e} \textbf{R}eLU neural \textbf{net}works, which yield smooth objectives while preserving the underlying quantile structure. We establish general nonasymptotic risk bounds for ConquerNet under mild conditions, providing minimax guarantees over Besov function classes. In numerical studies, we demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms standard quantile neural networks at multiple quantile levels, showing improved estimation accuracy and training efficiency across the board, with particularly pronounced advantages at high and low quantiles.
Calibrated Multi-Level Quantile Forecasting
Ding, Tiffany, Gibbs, Isaac, Tibshirani, Ryan J.
We present an online method for guaranteeing calibration of quantile forecasts at multiple quantile levels simultaneously. A sequence of $α$-level quantile forecasts is calibrated if the forecasts are larger than the target value at an $α$-fraction of time steps. We introduce a lightweight method called Multi-Level Quantile Tracker (MultiQT) that wraps around any existing point or quantile forecaster to produce corrected forecasts guaranteed to achieve calibration, even against adversarial distribution shifts, while ensuring that the forecasts are ordered -- e.g., the 0.5-level quantile forecast is never larger than the 0.6-level forecast. Furthermore, the method comes with a no-regret guarantee that implies it will not worsen the performance of an existing forecaster, asymptotically, with respect to the quantile loss. In experiments, we find that MultiQT significantly improves the calibration of real forecasters in epidemic and energy forecasting problems.
Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Control via Risk-Sensitive Action-Value Iteration and Quantile Regression
Enwerem, Clinton, Puranic, Aniruddh G., Baras, John S., Belta, Calin
Mainstream approximate action-value iteration reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms suffer from overestimation bias, leading to suboptimal policies in high-variance stochastic environments. Quantile-based action-value iteration methods reduce this bias by learning a distribution of the expected cost-to-go using quantile regression. However, ensuring that the learned policy satisfies safety constraints remains a challenge when these constraints are not explicitly integrated into the RL framework. Existing methods often require complex neural architectures or manual tradeoffs due to combined cost functions. To address this, we propose a risk-regularized quantile-based algorithm integrating Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) to enforce safety without complex architectures. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the contraction properties of the risk-sensitive distributional Bellman operator in Wasserstein space, ensuring convergence to a unique cost distribution. Simulations of a mobile robot in a dynamic reach-avoid task show that our approach leads to more goal successes, fewer collisions, and better safety-performance trade-offs than risk-neutral methods.
Moirai 2.0: When Less Is More for Time Series Forecasting
Liu, Chenghao, Aksu, Taha, Liu, Juncheng, Liu, Xu, Yan, Hanshu, Pham, Quang, Savarese, Silvio, Sahoo, Doyen, Xiong, Caiming, Li, Junnan
We introduce Moirai 2.0, a decoder-only time-series foundation model trained on a new corpus of 36M series. The model adopts quantile forecasting and multi-token prediction, improving both probabilistic accuracy and inference efficiency. On the Gift-Eval benchmark, it ranks among the top pretrained models while achieving a strong trade-off between accuracy, speed, and model size. Compared to Moirai 1.0, Moirai 2.0 replaces masked-encoder training, multi-patch inputs, and mixture-distribution outputs with a simpler decoder-only architecture, single patch, and quantile loss. Ablation studies isolate these changes -- showing that the decoder-only backbone along with recursive multi-quantile decoding contribute most to the gains. Additional experiments show that Moirai 2.0 outperforms larger models from the same family and exhibits robust domain-level results. In terms of efficiency and model size, Moirai 2.0 is twice as fast and thirty times smaller than its prior best version, Moirai 1.0-Large, while also performing better. Model performance plateaus with increasing parameter count and declines at longer horizons, motivating future work on data scaling and long-horizon modeling. We release code and evaluation details to support further research.
Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification with Anchored Ensembles for Robust EV Power Consumption Prediction
Farhani, Ghazal, Rahman, Taufiq, Humphries, Kieran
Accurate EV power estimation underpins range prediction and energy management, yet practitioners need both point accuracy and trustworthy uncertainty. We propose an anchored-ensemble Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a Student-t likelihood that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Anchoring imposes a Gaussian weight prior (MAP training), yielding posterior-like diversity without test-time sampling, while the t-head provides heavy-tailed robustness and closed-form prediction intervals. Using vehicle-kinematic time series (e.g., speed, motor RPM), our model attains strong accuracy: RMSE 3.36 +/- 1.10, MAE 2.21 +/- 0.89, R-squared = 0.93 +/- 0.02, explained variance 0.93 +/- 0.02, and delivers well-calibrated uncertainty bands with near-nominal coverage. Against competitive baselines (Student-t MC dropout; quantile regression with/without anchoring), our method matches or improves log-scores while producing sharper intervals at the same coverage. Crucially for real-time deployment, inference is a single deterministic pass per ensemble member (or a weight-averaged collapse), eliminating Monte Carlo latency. The result is a compact, theoretically grounded estimator that couples accuracy, calibration, and systems efficiency, enabling reliable range estimation and decision-making for production EV energy management.
SPADE-S: A Sparsity-Robust Foundational Forecaster
Wolff, Malcolm, Li, Matthew, Selvam, Ravi Kiran, Zhu, Hanjing, Olivares, Kin G., Ma, Ruijun, Katoch, Abhinav, Ramasubramanian, Shankar, Cao, Mengfei, Bandarra, Roberto, Gopalsamy, Rahul, La Vattiata, Stefania, Yang, Sitan, Mahoney, Michael M.
Despite significant advancements in time series forecasting, accurate modeling of time series with strong heterogeneity in magnitude and/or sparsity patterns remains challenging for state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. We identify several factors that lead existing models to systematically underperform on low-magnitude and sparse time series, including loss functions with implicit biases toward high-magnitude series, training-time sampling methods, and limitations of time series encoding methods. SPADE-S is a robust forecasting architecture that significantly reduces magnitude- and sparsity-based systematic biases and improves overall prediction accuracy. Empirical results demonstrate that SPADE-S outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches across a diverse set of use cases in demand forecasting. In particular, we show that, depending on the quantile forecast and magnitude of the series, SPADE-S can improve forecast accuracy by up to 15%. This results in P90 overall forecast accuracy gains of 2.21%, 6.58%, and 4.28%, and P50 forecast accuracy gains of 0.92%, 0.77%, and 1.95%, respectively, for each of three distinct datasets, ranging from 3 million to 700 million series, from a large online retailer.
Mirror Online Conformal Prediction with Intermittent Feedback
Wang, Bowen, Zecchin, Matteo, Simeone, Osvaldo
Online conformal prediction enables the runtime calibration of a pre-trained artificial intelligence model using feedback on its performance. Calibration is achieved through set predictions that are updated via online rules so as to ensure long-term coverage guarantees. While recent research has demonstrated the benefits of incorporating prior knowledge into the calibration process, this has come at the cost of replacing coverage guarantees with less tangible regret guarantees based on the quantile loss. This work introduces intermittent mirror online conformal prediction (IM-OCP), a novel runtime calibration framework that integrates prior knowledge, while maintaining long-term coverage and achieving sub-linear regret. IM-OCP features closed-form updates with minimal memory complexity, and is designed to operate under potentially intermittent feedback.
Forecasting intermittent time series with Gaussian Processes and Tweedie likelihood
Damato, Stefano, Azzimonti, Dario, Corani, Giorgio
We introduce the use of Gaussian Processes (GPs) for the probabilistic forecasting of intermittent time series. The model is trained in a Bayesian framework that accounts for the uncertainty about the latent function and marginalizes it out when making predictions. We couple the latent GP variable with two types of forecast distributions: the negative binomial (NegBinGP) and the Tweedie distribution (TweedieGP). While the negative binomial has already been used in forecasting intermittent time series, this is the first time in which a fully parameterized Tweedie density is used for intermittent time series. We properly evaluate the Tweedie density, which is both zero-inflated and heavy tailed, avoiding simplifying assumptions made in existing models. We test our models on thousands of intermittent count time series. Results show that our models provide consistently better probabilistic forecasts than the competitors. In particular, TweedieGP obtains the best estimates of the highest quantiles, thus showing that it is more flexible than NegBinGP.
Generalized Distribution Prediction for Asset Returns
Pétursson, Ísak, Óskarsdóttir, María
We present a novel approach for predicting the distribution of asset returns using a quantile-based method with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our model is designed in two stages: the first focuses on predicting the quantiles of normalized asset returns using asset-specific features, while the second stage incorporates market data to adjust these predictions for broader economic conditions. This results in a generalized model that can be applied across various asset classes, including commodities, cryptocurrencies, as well as synthetic datasets. The predicted quantiles are then converted into full probability distributions through kernel density estimation, allowing for more precise return distribution predictions and inferencing. The LSTM model significantly outperforms a linear quantile regression baseline by 98% and a dense neural network model by over 50%, showcasing its ability to capture complex patterns in financial return distributions across both synthetic and real-world data. By using exclusively asset-class-neutral features, our model achieves robust, generalizable results.