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In the presence of modeling errors, the mainstream Bayesian methods seldom give a realistic account of uncertainties as they commonly underestimate the inherent variability of parameters. This problem is not due to any misconception in the…

Applications · Statistics 2020-05-19 Omid Sedehi , Costas Papadimitriou , Lambros S. Katafygiotis

This paper studies the open problem of conformalized entry prediction in a row/column-exchangeable matrix. The matrix setting presents novel and unique challenges, but there exists little work on this interesting topic. We meticulously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Meijia Shao , Yuan Zhang

We consider the problem of distribution-free conditional predictive inference. Prior work has established that achieving exact finite-sample control of conditional coverage without distributional assumptions is impossible, in the sense that…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-29 Yonghoon Lee , Zhimei Ren

Missing values are unavoidable in many applications of machine learning and present challenges both during training and at test time. When variables are missing in recurring patterns, fitting separate pattern submodels have been proposed as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Lena Stempfle , Ashkan Panahi , Fredrik D. Johansson

Exchangeability -- in which the distribution of an infinite sequence is invariant to reorderings of its elements -- implies the existence of a simple conditional independence structure that may be leveraged in the design of statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-07-25 Trevor Campbell , Saifuddin Syed , Chiao-Yu Yang , Michael I. Jordan , Tamara Broderick

We propose a method for constructing distribution-free prediction intervals in nonparametric instrumental variable regression (NPIV), with finite-sample coverage guarantees. Building on the conditional guarantee framework in conformal…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-03-27 Masahiro Kato

Several uncertainty estimation methods have been recently proposed for machine translation evaluation. While these methods can provide a useful indication of when not to trust model predictions, we show in this paper that the majority of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Chrysoula Zerva , André F. T. Martins

We study three notions of uncertainty quantification -- calibration, confidence intervals and prediction sets -- for binary classification in the distribution-free setting, that is without making any distributional assumptions on the data.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-17 Chirag Gupta , Aleksandr Podkopaev , Aaditya Ramdas

Dependency networks (Heckerman et al., 2000) provide a flexible framework for modeling complex systems with many variables by combining independently learned local conditional distributions through pseudo-Gibbs sampling. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Kazuya Takabatake , Shotaro Akaho

Uncertainty is critical to reliable decision-making with machine learning. Conformal prediction (CP) handles uncertainty by predicting a set on a test input, hoping the set to cover the true label with at least $(1-\alpha)$ confidence. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Rui Xu , Yue Sun , Chao Chen , Parv Venkitasubramaniam , Sihong Xie

When outcome data are expensive or onerous to collect, scientists increasingly substitute predictions from machine learning and AI models for unlabeled cases, a process which has consequences for downstream statistical inference. While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-13 Stephen Salerno , Zhenke Wu , Tyler McCormick

We revisit the problem of constructing predictive confidence sets for which we wish to obtain some type of conditional validity. We provide new arguments showing how ``split conformal'' methods achieve near desired coverage levels with high…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-03-04 John C. Duchi

Conformal prediction is a widely used method to quantify the uncertainty of a classifier under the assumption of exchangeability (e.g., IID data). We generalize conformal prediction to the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) framework where the…

We study the problem of conditional predictive inference on multiple outcomes missing at random (MAR) -- or equivalently, under covariate shift. While the weighted conformal prediction offers a tool for inference under covariate shift with…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-01 Yonghoon Lee , Edgar Dobriban , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

In many statistical problems, the data distribution is specified through a generative process for which the likelihood function is analytically intractable, yet inference on the associated model parameters remains of primary interest. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-01 Haoyu Jiang , Yuexi Wang , Yun Yang

Prediction sets based on full conformal prediction have seen an increasing interest in statistical learning due to their universal marginal coverage guarantees. However, practitioners have refrained from using it in applications for two…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Nicolai Amann

Conformal prediction is a simple and powerful tool that can quantify uncertainty without any distributional assumptions. Many existing methods only address the average coverage guarantee, which is not ideal compared to the stronger…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-21 Xing Han , Ziyang Tang , Joydeep Ghosh , Qiang Liu

There is currently a renewed interest in the Bayesian predictive approach to statistics. This paper offers a review on foundational concepts and focuses on predictive modeling, which by directly reasoning on prediction, bypasses inferential…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-22 Sandra Fortini , Sonia Petrone

Conformal inference is a fundamental and versatile tool that provides distribution-free guarantees for many machine learning tasks. We consider the transductive setting, where decisions are made on a test sample of $m$ new points, giving…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-20 Ulysse Gazin , Gilles Blanchard , Etienne Roquain

The machine learning literature contains several constructions for prediction intervals that are intuitively reasonable but ultimately ad-hoc in that they do not come with provable performance guarantees. We present methods from the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-25 Danijel Kivaranovic , Kory D. Johnson , Hannes Leeb