English

Conformalized Decision Risk Assessment

Machine Learning 2025-12-18 v3 Machine Learning

Abstract

In many operational settings, decision-makers must commit to actions before uncertainty resolves, but existing optimization tools rarely quantify how consistently a chosen decision remains optimal across plausible scenarios. This paper introduces CREDO -- Conformalized Risk Estimation for Decision Optimization, a distribution-free framework that quantifies the probability that a prescribed decision remains (near-)optimal across realizations of uncertainty. CREDO reformulates decision risk through the inverse feasible region -- the set of outcomes under which a decision is optimal -- and estimates its probability using inner approximations constructed from conformal prediction balls generated by a conditional generative model. This approach yields finite-sample, distribution-free lower bounds on the probability of decision optimality. The framework is model-agnostic and broadly applicable across a wide range of optimization problems. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that CREDO provides accurate, efficient, and reliable evaluations of decision optimality across various optimization settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.13243,
  title  = {Conformalized Decision Risk Assessment},
  author = {Wenbin Zhou and Agni Orfanoudaki and Shixiang Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13243},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:22:11.254Z