English

Confidence and Uncertainty Assessment for Distributional Random Forests

Statistics Theory 2023-12-20 v3 Machine Learning Statistics Theory

Abstract

The Distributional Random Forest (DRF) is a recently introduced Random Forest algorithm to estimate multivariate conditional distributions. Due to its general estimation procedure, it can be employed to estimate a wide range of targets such as conditional average treatment effects, conditional quantiles, and conditional correlations. However, only results about the consistency and convergence rate of the DRF prediction are available so far. We characterize the asymptotic distribution of DRF and develop a bootstrap approximation of it. This allows us to derive inferential tools for quantifying standard errors and the construction of confidence regions that have asymptotic coverage guarantees. In simulation studies, we empirically validate the developed theory for inference of low-dimensional targets and for testing distributional differences between two populations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.05761,
  title  = {Confidence and Uncertainty Assessment for Distributional Random Forests},
  author = {Jeffrey Näf and Corinne Emmenegger and Peter Bühlmann and Nicolai Meinshausen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.05761},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:37:50.663Z