pith. sign in

arxiv: 1903.04684 · v2 · pith:3APHW6YCnew · submitted 2019-03-12 · 🧮 math.ST · stat.TH

The limits of distribution-free conditional predictive inference

classification 🧮 math.ST stat.TH
keywords coverageguaranteespredictiveconditionaldistribution-freeinferenceaveragemarginal
0
0 comments X
read the original abstract

We consider the problem of distribution-free predictive inference, with the goal of producing predictive coverage guarantees that hold conditionally rather than marginally. Existing methods such as conformal prediction offer marginal coverage guarantees, where predictive coverage holds on average over all possible test points, but this is not sufficient for many practical applications where we would like to know that our predictions are valid for a given individual, not merely on average over a population. On the other hand, exact conditional inference guarantees are known to be impossible without imposing assumptions on the underlying distribution. In this work we aim to explore the space in between these two, and examine what types of relaxations of the conditional coverage property would alleviate some of the practical concerns with marginal coverage guarantees while still being possible to achieve in a distribution-free setting.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. The Statistical Cost of Adaptation in Multi-Source Transfer Learning

    math.ST 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 8.0

    Multi-source transfer learning incurs an intrinsic adaptation cost that can exceed one, with phase transitions separating regimes where bias-agnostic estimators match oracle performance from those where they cannot.

  2. Self-Organized Conformal Prediction: Reducing Regional Coverage Gaps with Unsupervised Group Discovery

    stat.ML 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SOCP uses self-organizing maps for unsupervised group discovery to enable local calibration in conformal prediction, reducing regional coverage gaps on benchmarks with small set-size increases while preserving validit...

  3. Risk-Controlled Post-Processing of Decision Policies

    stat.ML 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Risk-controlled post-processing yields a threshold-structured policy that follows the baseline except where an oracle fallback sharply reduces conditional violation risk, achieving O(log n/n) expected excess risk in i...