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Related papers: Universally consistent predictive distributions

200 papers

Conformal prediction is a framework for providing prediction intervals with distribution-free validity, guaranteeing predictive coverage for data drawn from any distribution. Its two main variants are full conformal prediction and split…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-29 Aabesh Bhattacharyya , Boxuan Zhang , Rina Foygel Barber

Conformal predictive systems allow forecasters to issue predictive distributions for real-valued future outcomes that have out-of-sample calibration guarantees. On a more abstract level, conformal prediction makes use of in-sample…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-07 Sam Allen , Georgios Gavrilopoulos , Alexander Henzi , Gian-Reto Kleger , Johanna Ziegel

How might a smooth probability distribution be estimated, with accurately quantified uncertainty, from a limited amount of sampled data? Here we describe a field-theoretic approach that addresses this problem remarkably well in one…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-10-24 Wei-Chia Chen , Ammar Tareen , Justin B. Kinney

The field of distribution-free predictive inference provides tools for provably valid prediction without any assumptions on the distribution of the data, which can be paired with any regression algorithm to provide accurate and reliable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-19 Michael Bian , Rina Foygel Barber

This paper develops a theory of distribution- and time-uniform asymptotics, culminating in the first large-sample anytime-valid inference procedures that are shown to be uniformly valid in a rich class of distributions. Historically,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-16 Ian Waudby-Smith , Edward H. Kennedy , Aaditya Ramdas

Prediction sets provide a means of quantifying the uncertainty in predictive tasks. Using held out calibration data, conformal prediction and risk control can produce prediction sets that exhibit statistically valid error control in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Bror Hultberg , Dave Zachariah , Antônio H. Ribeiro

Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction sets with guaranteed marginal coverage. However, in split conformal prediction this guarantee is training-conditional only in expectation: across many calibration draws, the average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Petrus H. Zwart

We propose a computationally efficient method to construct nonparametric, heteroscedastic prediction bands for uncertainty quantification, with or without any user-specified predictive model. Our approach provides an alternative to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Tengyuan Liang

Prediction, where observed data is used to quantify uncertainty about a future observation, is a fundamental problem in statistics. Prediction sets with coverage probability guarantees are a common solution, but these do not provide…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-22 Leonardo Cella , Ryan Martin

Conformal prediction is an assumption-lean approach to generating distribution-free prediction intervals or sets, for nearly arbitrary predictive models, with guaranteed finite-sample coverage. Conformal methods are an active research topic…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-19 Jerzy Wieczorek

Score matching is an estimation procedure that has been developed for statistical models whose probability density function is known up to proportionality but whose normalizing constant is intractable, so that maximum likelihood is…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-23 Jiazhen Xu , Janice L. Scealy , Andrew T. A. Wood , Tao Zou

Many probabilistic models that have an intractable normalizing constant may be extended to contain covariates. Since the evaluation of the exact likelihood is difficult or even impossible for these models, score matching was proposed to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-21 Jiazhen Xu , Janice L. Scealy , Andrew T. A. Wood , Tao Zou

Conformal prediction provides a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification via prediction sets with exact finite-sample coverage. In low dimensions these sets are easy to interpret, but in high-dimensional or structured…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Trevor Harris

Wasserman et al. (2020, PNAS, vol. 117, pp. 16880-16890) constructed estimator agnostic and finite-sample valid confidence sets and hypothesis tests, using split-data likelihood ratio-based statistics. We demonstrate that the same approach…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-24 Hien Duy Nguyen

Complex continuous or mixed joint distributions (e.g., P(Y | z_1, z_2, ..., z_N)) generally lack closed-form solutions, often necessitating approximations such as MCMC. This paper proposes Indeterminate Probability Theory (IPT), which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Tao Yang , Chuang Liu , Xiaofeng Ma , Weijia Lu , Ning Wu , Bingyang Li , Zhifei Yang , Peng Liu , Lin Sun , Xiaodong Zhang , Can Zhang

We introduce Conformal Decision Theory, a framework for producing safe autonomous decisions despite imperfect machine learning predictions. Examples of such decisions are ubiquitous, from robot planning algorithms that rely on pedestrian…

This paper presents a new conformal method for generating simultaneous forecasting bands guaranteed to cover the entire path of a new random trajectory with sufficiently high probability. Prompted by the need for dependable uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-16 Yanfei Zhou , Lars Lindemann , Matteo Sesia

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in statistical methods that exhibit robust performance under distribution changes between training and test data. While most of the related research focuses on point predictions with the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-18 Alexander Henzi , Xinwei Shen , Michael Law , Peter Bühlmann

Statistical hypothesis tests typically use prespecified sample sizes, yet data often arrive sequentially. Interim analyses invalidate classical error guarantees, while existing sequential methods require rigid testing preschedules or incur…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-17 Chris Holmes , Stephen Walker

If the prior probability distributions of all possible hypothetical true means and all possible observed means of a continuous variable are conditional on the universal set of all numbers (i.e., before the nature of a study is known and a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-05 Huw Llewelyn