用树形结构预测区间,让预测更准更短。
PATH: Next-Interval Prediction via Autoregressive Tree Hierarchy on Tabular Data

- 将区间预测建模为自回归树结构,学习概率在子区间间的流动。
- 在56个数据集上平均区间长度仅0.1473,覆盖率达91.44%。
- 适合需要紧凑置信区间的表格数据预测任务。
区间预测的目标是在保证目标覆盖率的前提下生成尽可能短的区间。现有方法通常先预测不确定度代理量,再通过校准或选择转换为区间,这种分离方式虽支持覆盖率校准,但最终区间由事后规则决定,未能充分利用学习到的输出分布。我们观察到,所得区间具有固有的层次几何结构:一个区间可递归细分为嵌套子区间,二叉树自然表达该结构。本文提出PATH,将此层次结构建模为下一步区间预测任务,学习概率从每个区间流向其下一子区间的分布。PATH首先预测基础叶节点分布,再通过自回归解码器细化分支概率。将分布与区间层次对齐,使学习与提取一致:累积相邻输出区间的概率,返回达到指定概率质量的最短连续范围。在包含56个OpenML回归数据集的PATHBench上,与24个基线对比,PATH显著缩短区间长度,平均归一化长度达0.1473,同时保持0.9144的平均覆盖率。结果证明,层次化输出建模是表格数据上紧凑区间预测的有效方法。代码已开源:https://github.com/pxcai/PATH。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Interval prediction aims to achieve a target coverage level while producing intervals that are as short as possible. Many conformal regression pipelines first predict an uncertainty surrogate and then convert it into an interval through calibration or selection. This separation supports coverage calibration, but post hoc rules largely determine the final interval and do not fully use the learned output distribution. We observe that the resulting intervals have inherently hierarchical geometry: an interval can be recursively refined into nested subintervals, and binary trees naturally represent this structure. We formulate this hierarchy as next-interval prediction and propose PATH, which learns how probability mass flows from each interval to its next nested subintervals. PATH predicts a base leaf distribution and uses an autoregressive decoder to refine branch probabilities. Matching the distribution to the interval hierarchy aligns learning with extraction: PATH accumulates probability over adjacent output intervals and returns the shortest contiguous range reaching a selected mass. We compare PATH with 24 baselines for interval prediction on PATHBench, comprising 56 OpenML regression datasets. PATH substantially shortens the resulting intervals, achieving the lowest mean normalized length, 0.1473, while maintaining mean coverage of 0.9144. These results establish hierarchical output modeling as an effective approach for compact interval prediction on tabular data. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/pxcai/PATH.
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