为风险规避者设计最优不确定性量化方法,提升医疗等关键场景决策安全与效率。
Decision Theoretic Foundations for Conformal Prediction: Optimal Uncertainty Quantification for Risk-Averse Agents

- 用预测集替代单一预测,更适配风险敏感决策
- 提出最大最小策略,实现风险规避下的最优动作映射
- 算法RAC可黑箱利用预测质量,兼顾安全与实用
数据驱动决策中的核心问题是如何以有用方式量化预测不确定性。在医疗等风险敏感领域尤为关键。本文从决策理论出发,建立预测集与风险规避决策之间的联系。回答三个基本问题:(1) 风险规避者应采用何种不确定性度量?证明预测集是最优选择,可优化其价值风险(Value at Risk);(2) 风险规避者应如何将预测集映射为行动?证明简单最大最小策略最优;(3) 如何构造对这类决策者最优的预测集?给出总体情形下的精确刻画及无分布的有限样本构造方法。由此自然导出算法Risk-Averse Calibration(RAC),其设计可证明最优,兼具实用性——能黑箱利用预测质量提升下游效用,且保证用户定义的风险阈值,优化对应风险分位数。实验表明,RAC在医疗诊断与推荐系统中显著优于现有方法,实现更高的效用与更强的安全保障。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A fundamental question in data-driven decision making is how to quantify the uncertainty of predictions in ways that can usefully inform downstream action. This interface between prediction uncertainty and decision-making is especially important in risk-sensitive domains, such as medicine. In this paper, we develop decision-theoretic foundations that connect uncertainty quantification using prediction sets with risk-averse decision-making. Specifically, we answer three fundamental questions: (1) What is the correct notion of uncertainty quantification for risk-averse decision makers? We prove that prediction sets are optimal for decision makers who wish to optimize their value at risk. (2) What is the optimal policy that a risk averse decision maker should use to map prediction sets to actions? We show that a simple max-min decision policy is optimal for risk-averse decision makers. Finally, (3) How can we derive prediction sets that are optimal for such decision makers? We provide an exact characterization in the population regime and a distribution free finite-sample construction. Answering these questions naturally leads to an algorithm, Risk-Averse Calibration (RAC), which follows a provably optimal design for deriving action policies from predictions. RAC is designed to be both practical-capable of leveraging the quality of predictions in a black-box manner to enhance downstream utility-and safe-adhering to a user-defined risk threshold and optimizing the corresponding risk quantile of the user's downstream utility. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the significant advantages of RAC in applications such as medical diagnosis and recommendation systems. Specifically, we show that RAC achieves a substantially improved trade-off between safety and utility, offering higher utility compared to existing methods while maintaining the safety guarantee.
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