arXiv:2505.19033stat.MLcs.LG2025-05中稿 · UAI 2026被引 3

用可信集提升置信预测精度,兼顾不确定性表达与覆盖率

Optimal Conformal Prediction under Epistemic Uncertainty

  • 引入伯努利预测集,同时刻画认知与随机不确定性
  • 在保证条件覆盖的前提下,预测集期望大小最小化
  • 理论证明高概率下覆盖率达目标水平,适合可靠决策场景

置信预测(CP)是一种广泛使用的频率学框架,通过构建具有用户指定边际覆盖率的预测集来量化不确定性。实践中,CP通常作用于能表达随机不确定性但无法刻画认知不确定性的概率分类器。本文探讨如何在更丰富的形式——可信集(credal sets)上最优地应用CP,可信集可同时表达两类不确定性。我们提出概率伯努利预测集(BPS),并推导出一种在保证有效可信集条件下覆盖性的同时,仍保持最小期望大小的变体。随后,在可信集有效性不保证的更现实场景中,假设拥有标注真实标签分布的校准数据,我们对BPS应用置信风险控制,推导出类似PAC的保证:在数据上以高概率成立时,实现的条件覆盖率至少达到目标水平。我们在多个数据集上验证了理论结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Conformal prediction (CP) is a widely used frequentist framework to quantify uncertainty by constructing prediction sets with user-specified marginal coverage guarantees. In practice, CP is typically applied on top of probabilistic classifiers, which are able to express aleatoric but not epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the question of how to optimally employ CP on top of a more expressive formalism, namely credal sets, which can express both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. More specifically, we propose probabilistic Bernoulli prediction sets (BPS) and derive a variant that achieves conditional coverage for valid credal sets while remaining minimal in expected size. We then address the more realistic scenario in which the validity of the credal sets is not guaranteed. Assuming access to calibration data with ground-truth distributions over labels, we apply conformal risk control to BPS and derive a PAC-style guarantee: with high probability over the data, the achieved conditional coverage is at least the desired level. We validate our theoretical findings empirically over various datasets.

置信预测不确定性量化可信集

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