Related papers: Preventing the Forecaster's Evaluation Dilemma
Logistic models are studied as a tool to convert output from numerical weather forecasting systems (deterministic and ensemble) into probability forecasts for binary events. A logistic model obtains by putting the logarithmic odds ratio…
The ``prediction + optimal control'' scheme has shown good performance in many applications of automotive, traffic, robot, and building control. In practice, the prediction results are simply considered correct in the optimal control design…
Algorithmic pricing is the computational problem that sellers (e.g., in supermarkets) face when trying to set prices for their items to maximize their profit in the presence of a known demand. Guruswami et al. (2005) propose this problem…
The multi-class prediction had gained popularity over recent years. Thus measuring fit goodness becomes a cardinal question that researchers often have to deal with. Several metrics are commonly used for this task. However, when one has to…
Machine learning is about forecasting. When the forecasts come with an evaluation metric the forecasts become useful. What are reasonable evaluation metrics? How do existing evaluation metrics relate? In this work, we provide a general…
Applying a machine learning model for decision-making in the real world requires to distinguish what the model knows from what it does not. A critical factor in assessing the knowledge of a model is to quantify its predictive uncertainty.…
In the face of uncertainty, the need for probabilistic assessments has long been recognized in the literature on forecasting. In classification, however, comparative evaluation of classifiers often focuses on predictions specifying a single…
In many real-world applications, a model provider provides probabilistic forecasts to downstream decision-makers who use them to make decisions under diverse payoff objectives. The provider may have access to multiple predictive models,…
This paper introduces a martingale that characterizes two properties of evolving forecast distributions. Ideal forecasts of a future event behave as martingales, sequen- tially updating the forecast to leverage the available information as…
Due to numerous applications in retail and (online) advertising the problem of assortment selection has been widely studied under many combinations of discrete choice models and feasibility constraints. In many situations, however, an…
For users to trust model predictions, they need to understand model outputs, particularly their confidence - calibration aims to adjust (calibrate) models' confidence to match expected accuracy. We argue that the traditional calibration…
Several problems in statistics involve the combination of high-variance unbiased estimators with low-variance estimators that are only unbiased under strong assumptions. A notable example is the estimation of causal effects while combining…
As neural networks become more popular, the need for accompanying uncertainty estimates increases. There are currently two main approaches to test the quality of these estimates. Most methods output a density. They can be compared by…
Decision-makers consult multiple forecasts to account for uncertainties when forming judgments about future events. While prior works have compared unaggregated and highly-aggregated designs for displaying multiple forecasts (e.g., Multiple…
We study the classical newsvendor problem in which the decision-maker must trade-off underage and overage costs. In contrast to the typical setting, we assume that the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution driving…
Individual probabilities refer to the probabilities of outcomes that are realized only once: the probability that it will rain tomorrow, the probability that Alice will die within the next 12 months, the probability that Bob will be…
We consider the problem of evaluating forecasts of binary events whose predictions are consumed by rational agents who take an action in response to a prediction, but whose utility is unknown to the forecaster. We show that optimizing…
Classification systems are evaluated in a countless number of papers. However, we find that evaluation practice is often nebulous. Frequently, metrics are selected without arguments, and blurry terminology invites misconceptions. For…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…