Conditional Coverage Estimation for High-quality Prediction Intervals

Ziyi Huang, Henry Lam, Haofeng Zhang

Abstract: Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance to generate high-quality prediction intervals (PIs) for uncertainty quantification in regression tasks. The high-quality criterion requires PIs to be as narrow as possible, whilst maintaining a pre-specified level of data (marginal) coverage. However, most existing works for high-quality PIs lack accurate information on conditional coverage, which may cause unreliable predictions if it is significantly smaller than the marginal coverage. To address this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework which could output high-quality PIs and simultaneously provide their conditional coverage estimation. In doing so, we design a new loss function that is both easy-to-implement and theoretically justified via an exponential concentration bound. Our evaluation on real-world benchmark datasets and synthetic examples shows that our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-arts on high-quality PIs in terms of average PI width, but also accurately estimates conditional coverage information that is useful in assessing model uncertainty.

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