English

Inductive randomness predictors: beyond conformal

Machine Learning 2025-07-08 v2 Methodology

Abstract

This paper introduces inductive randomness predictors, which form a proper superset of inductive conformal predictors but have the same principal property of validity under the assumption of randomness (i.e., of IID data). It turns out that every non-trivial inductive conformal predictor is strictly dominated by an inductive randomness predictor, although the improvement is not great, at most a factor of e2.72\mathrm{e}\approx2.72 in the case of e-prediction. The dominating inductive randomness predictors are more complicated and more difficult to compute; besides, an improvement by a factor of e\mathrm{e} is rare. Therefore, this paper does not suggest replacing inductive conformal predictors by inductive randomness predictors and only calls for a more detailed study of the latter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.02803,
  title  = {Inductive randomness predictors: beyond conformal},
  author = {Vladimir Vovk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02803},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables; this version is greatly expanded