Open Access
April 2023 Conformal prediction beyond exchangeability
Rina Foygel Barber, Emmanuel J. Candès, Aaditya Ramdas, Ryan J. Tibshirani
Author Affiliations +
Ann. Statist. 51(2): 816-845 (April 2023). DOI: 10.1214/23-AOS2276

Abstract

Conformal prediction is a popular, modern technique for providing valid predictive inference for arbitrary machine learning models. Its validity relies on the assumptions of exchangeability of the data, and symmetry of the given model fitting algorithm as a function of the data. However, exchangeability is often violated when predictive models are deployed in practice. For example, if the data distribution drifts over time, then the data points are no longer exchangeable; moreover, in such settings, we might want to use a nonsymmetric algorithm that treats recent observations as more relevant. This paper generalizes conformal prediction to deal with both aspects: we employ weighted quantiles to introduce robustness against distribution drift, and design a new randomization technique to allow for algorithms that do not treat data points symmetrically. Our new methods are provably robust, with substantially less loss of coverage when exchangeability is violated due to distribution drift or other challenging features of real data, while also achieving the same coverage guarantees as existing conformal prediction methods if the data points are in fact exchangeable. We demonstrate the practical utility of these new tools with simulations and real-data experiments on electricity and election forecasting.

Funding Statement

R.F.B. was supported by the National Science Foundation via grants DMS-1654076 and DMS-2023109, and by the Office of Naval Research via grant N00014-20-1-2337.
E.J.C. was supported by the Office of Naval Research grant N00014-20-1-2157, the National Science Foundation grant DMS-2032014, the Simons Foundation under award 814641, and the ARO grant 2003514594.
R.J.T. was supported by ONR grant N00014-20-1-2787.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the American Institute of Mathematics for supporting and hosting our collaboration. The authors are grateful to Vladimir Vovk for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. E.J.C. would like to thank John Cherian and Isaac Gibbs for their help with the presidential election data.

Citation

Download Citation

Rina Foygel Barber. Emmanuel J. Candès. Aaditya Ramdas. Ryan J. Tibshirani. "Conformal prediction beyond exchangeability." Ann. Statist. 51 (2) 816 - 845, April 2023. https://doi.org/10.1214/23-AOS2276

Information

Received: 1 March 2022; Revised: 1 February 2023; Published: April 2023
First available in Project Euclid: 13 June 2023

zbMATH: 07714182
MathSciNet: MR4601003
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/23-AOS2276

Subjects:
Primary: 62G35
Secondary: 62F40 , 62G86

Keywords: conformal prediction , distribution-free inference , exchangeability , jackknife , robust statistics

Rights: Copyright © 2023 Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Vol.51 • No. 2 • April 2023
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