Related papers: The problem with the Brier score
Mathematical proof aims to deliver confident conclusions, but a very similar process of deduction can be used to make uncertain estimates that are open to revision. A key ingredient in such reasoning is the use of a "default" estimate of…
Survival analysis is the problem of estimating probability distributions for future event times, which can be seen as a problem in uncertainty quantification. Although there are fundamental theories on strictly proper scoring rules for…
Predictions are often probabilities; e.g., a prediction could be for precipitation tomorrow, but with only a 30% chance. Given such probabilistic predictions together with the actual outcomes, "reliability diagrams" help detect and diagnose…
We revisit empirical Bayes discrimination detection, focusing on uncertainty arising from both partial identification and sampling variability. While prior work has mostly focused on partial identification, we find that some empirical…
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.…
Ordinal user-provided ratings across multiple items are frequently encountered in both scientific and commercial applications. Whilst recommender systems are known to do well on these type of data from a predictive point of view, their…
In contrast to its common definition and calculation, interpretation of p-values diverges among statisticians. Since p-value is the basis of various methodologies, this divergence has led to a variety of test methodologies and evaluations…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
Normalized mutual information is widely used as a similarity measure for evaluating the performance of clustering and classification algorithms. In this paper, we argue that results returned by the normalized mutual information are biased…
A policy maker faces a sequence of unknown outcomes. At each stage two (self-proclaimed) experts provide probabilistic forecasts on the outcome in the next stage. A comparison test is a protocol for the policy maker to (eventually) decide…
The quality of probabilistic forecasts is crucial for decision-making under uncertainty. While proper scoring rules incentivize truthful reporting of precise forecasts, they fall short when forecasters face epistemic uncertainty about their…
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…
A set of probabilistic predictions is well calibrated if the events that are predicted to occur with probability p do in fact occur about p fraction of the time. Well calibrated predictions are particularly important when machine learning…
Calibration is a frequently invoked concept when useful label probability estimates are required on top of classification accuracy. A calibrated model is a function whose values correctly reflect underlying label probabilities. Calibration…
Machine learning models are often used to inform real world risk assessment tasks: predicting consumer default risk, predicting whether a person suffers from a serious illness, or predicting a person's risk to appear in court. Given…
Uncertainty representation and quantification are paramount in machine learning and constitute an important prerequisite for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose novel measures for the quantification of aleatoric and…
In a binary classification problem the feature vector (predictor) is the input to a scoring function that produces a decision value (score), which is compared to a particular chosen threshold to provide a final class prediction (output).…
Fields like public health, public policy, and social science often want to quantify the degree of dependence between variables whose relationships take on unknown functional forms. Typically, in fact, researchers in these fields are…
The paper presents a construction of a quantitative measure of variability for parameter estimates in the data fitting problem under interval uncertainty. It shows the degree of variability and ambiguity of the estimate, and the need for…
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire…