Discretization-free Multicalibration through Loss Minimization over Tree Ensembles

Hongyi Henry Jin, Zijun Ding, Dung Daniel Ngo, Steven Wu

Keywords: Algorithmic Fairness, Multicalibration

Abstract:

In recent years, multicalibration has emerged as a desirable learning objective for ensuring that a predictor is calibrated across a rich collection of overlapping subpopulations. Existing approaches typically achieve multicalibration by discretizing the predictor's output space and iteratively adjusting its output values. However, this discretization approach departs from the standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) pipeline, introduces rounding error and an additional sensitive hyperparameter, and may distort the predictor’s outputs in ways that hinder downstream decision-making.

In this work, we propose a discretization-free multicalibration method that directly optimizes an empirical risk objective over an ensemble of depth-two decision trees. Our ERM approach can be implemented using off-the-shelf tree ensemble learning methods such as LightGBM. Our algorithm provably achieves multicalibration, provided that the data distribution satisfies a technical condition we term as loss saturation. Across multiple datasets, our empirical evaluation shows that this condition is always met in practice. Our discretization-free algorithm consistently matches or outperforms existing multicalibration approaches—even when evaluated using a discretization-based multicalibration metric that shares its discretization granularity with the baselines. Code to replicate the results in this work is available at https://github.com/hjenryin/Discretization-free-MC.

Primary Area: Social and economic aspects of machine learning (e.g., fairness, interpretability, human-AI interaction, privacy, safety, strategic behavior)

Submission Number: 26786