English
Related papers

Related papers: On the Unknowable Limits to Prediction

200 papers

Conformal Prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage, but its reliance on a single global calibration threshold obscures the sources of uncertainty at the instance level. In particular, it conflates…

The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Eyke Hüllermeier , Willem Waegeman

We introduce the fundamental ideas and challenges of Predictable AI, a nascent research area that explores the ways in which we can anticipate key validity indicators (e.g., performance, safety) of present and future AI ecosystems. We argue…

A crucial input into causal inference is the imputed counterfactual outcome. Imputation error can arise because of sampling uncertainty from estimating the prediction model using the untreated observations, or from out-of-sample information…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-20 Silvia Goncalves , Serena Ng

The quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in terms of conditional entropy and mutual information, respectively, has recently become quite common in machine learning. While the properties of these measures, which are rooted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Lisa Wimmer , Yusuf Sale , Paul Hofman , Bern Bischl , Eyke Hüllermeier

Machine learning researchers and practitioners steadily enlarge the multitude of successful learning models. They achieve this through in-depth theoretical analyses and experiential heuristics. However, there is no known general-purpose…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Matthias C. Caro

Uncertainty can be classified as either aleatoric (intrinsic randomness) or epistemic (imperfect knowledge of parameters). The majority of frameworks assessing infectious disease risk consider only epistemic uncertainty. We only ever…

This paper presents a theory of systemic undecidability, reframing incomputability as a structural property of systems rather than a localized feature of specific functions or problems. We define a notion of causal embedding and prove a…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Seth Bulin

With the wide adoption of machine learning techniques, requirements have evolved beyond sheer high performance, often requiring models to be trustworthy. A common approach to increase the trustworthiness of such systems is to allow them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Andrea Pugnana , Carlos Mougan , Dan Saattrup Nielsen

When predictive models are used to support complex and important decisions, the ability to explain a model's reasoning can increase trust, expose hidden biases, and reduce vulnerability to adversarial attacks. However, attempts at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Dimitris Bertsimas , Arthur Delarue , Patrick Jaillet , Sebastien Martin

There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2011-06-24 Hector Zenil , Fernando Soler-Toscano , Joost J. Joosten

Fitting models to data is an important part of the practice of science. Advances in machine learning have made it possible to fit more -- and more complex -- models, but have also exacerbated a problem: when multiple models fit the data…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-27 Alexandre René , André Longtin

Identifying and disentangling sources of predictive uncertainty is essential for trustworthy supervised learning. We argue that widely used second-order methods that disentangle aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are fundamentally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Sebastián Jiménez , Mira Jürgens , Willem Waegeman

We introduce a notion of computable randomness for infinite sequences that generalises the classical version in two important ways. First, our definition of computable randomness is associated with imprecise probability models, in the sense…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-09-23 Floris Persiau , Jasper De Bock , Gert de Cooman

The predictability of errors in deterministic temperature forecasts is investigated. More precisely, the aim is to issue warnings whenever the differences between forecast and verification exceed a given threshold. The warnings are…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2011-12-08 S. Hallerberg , J. Bröcker , H. Kantz , L. A. Smith

There is a growing concern about typically opaque decision-making with high-performance machine learning algorithms. Providing an explanation of the reasoning process in domain-specific terms can be crucial for adoption in risk-sensitive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Aditya Chattopadhyay , Stewart Slocum , Benjamin D. Haeffele , Rene Vidal , Donald Geman

Forecasting is usually framed as a problem of model choice. This paper starts earlier, asking how much predictive information is available at each horizon. Under logarithmic loss, the answer is exact: the mutual information between the…

Applications · Statistics 2026-03-31 Peter Maurice Catt

We address the problem of uncertainty quantification and propose measures of total, aleatoric, and epistemic uncertainty based on a known decomposition of (strictly) proper scoring rules, a specific type of loss function, into a divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Paul Hofman , Yusuf Sale , Eyke Hüllermeier

We present a new and compelling approach to the efficient solution of important computational problems that arise in the context of abstract argumentation. Our approach makes known algorithms defined for restricted fragments generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-04-18 Sebastian Ordyniak , Stefan Szeider

This paper proposes an Adaptive Learning Model Predictive Control strategy for uncertain constrained linear systems performing iterative tasks. The additive uncertainty is modeled as the sum of a bounded process noise and an unknown…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-04-27 Monimoy Bujarbaruah , Xiaojing Zhang , Ugo Rosolia , Francesco Borrelli