Many selection processes such as finding patients qualifying for a medical trial or retrieval pipelines in search engines consist of multiple stages, where an initial screening stage focuses the resources on shortlisting the most promising candidates. In this paper, we investigate what guarantees a screening classifier can provide, independently of whether it is constructed manually or trained. We find that current solutions do not enjoy distribution-free theoretical guarantees -- we show that, in general, even for a perfectly calibrated classifier, there always exist specific pools of candidates for which its shortlist is suboptimal. Then, we develop a distribution-free screening algorithm -- called Calibrated Subset Selection (CSS) -- that, given any classifier and some amount of calibration data, finds near-optimal shortlists of candidates that contain a desired number of qualified candidates in expectation. Moreover, we show that a variant of CSS that calibrates a given classifier multiple times across specific groups can create shortlists with provable diversity guarantees. Experiments on US Census survey data validate our theoretical results and show that the shortlists provided by our algorithm are superior to those provided by several competitive baselines.
Excellent ranking power along with well calibrated probability estimates are needed in many classification tasks. In this paper, we introduce a technique, Calibrated Boosting-Forest that captures both. This novel technique is an ensemble of gradient boosting machines that can support both continuous and binary labels. While offering superior ranking power over any individual regression or classification model, Calibrated Boosting-Forest is able to preserve well calibrated posterior probabilities. Along with these benefits, we provide an alternative to the tedious step of tuning gradient boosti…
Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Maribor（马里博尔大学健康科学学院）
Machine Learning (ML) models are often complex and difficult to interpret due to their 'black-box' characteristics. Interpretability of a ML model is usually defined as the degree to which a human can understand the cause of decisions reached by a ML model. Interpretability is of extremely high importance in many fields of healthcare due to high levels of risk related to decisions based on ML models. Calibration of the ML model outputs is another issue often overlooked in the application of ML models in practice. This paper represents an early work in examination of prediction model calibratio…
A Quiet Failure in Calibrated Virtual Screening: Marginal Conformal Prediction Under-Covers the Minority Class, and a Class-Conditional Fix Recovers It
School of Science and Technology, Champions College Prep（科学与技术学院，冠军大学预科）
From the statistical learning perspective, complexity control via explicit regularization is a necessity for improving the generalization of over-parameterized models. However, the impressive generalization performance of neural networks with only implicit regularization may be at odds with this conventional wisdom. In this work, we revisit the importance of explicit regularization for obtaining well-calibrated predictive uncertainty. Specifically, we introduce a probabilistic measure of calibration performance, which is lower bounded by the log-likelihood. We then explore explicit regularizat…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Standard convolutional neural networks(CNNs) require consistent image resolutions in both training and testing phase. However, in practice, testing with smaller image sizes is necessary for fast inference. We show that trivially evaluating low-resolution images on networks trained with high-resolution images results in a catastrophic accuracy drop in standard CNN architectures. We propose a novel training regime called Scale calibrated Training(SCT) which allows networks to learn from various scales of input simultaneously. By taking advantages of SCT, single network can provide decent accurac…
SCALE: Simulation-Calibrated Amortized Learning for Energy Materials (A hybrid architecture connecting deterministic modeling, real-world data, and transformer-scale inference for accelerated energy-materials discovery)
Screening feature selection methods are often used as a preprocessing step for reducing the number of variables before training step. Traditional screening methods only focus on dealing with complete high dimensional datasets. Modern datasets not only have higher dimension and larger sample size, but also have properties such as streaming input, sparsity and concept drift. Therefore a considerable number of online feature selection methods were introduced to handle these kind of problems in recent years. Online screening methods are one of the categories of online feature selection methods. Th…
Filter or screening methods are often used as a preprocessing step for reducing the number of variables used by a learning algorithm in obtaining a classification or regression model. While there are many such filter methods, there is a need for an objective evaluation of these methods. Such an evaluation is needed to compare them with each other and also to answer whether they are at all useful, or a learning algorithm could do a better job without them. For this purpose, many popular screening methods are partnered in this paper with three regression learners and five classification learners…
Improving Colorectal Cancer Screening and Risk Assessment through Predictive Modeling on Medical Images and Records
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth（达特茅斯盖泽尔医学院）；Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center（达特茅斯-希区柯克医学中心）；New Hampshire Colonoscopy Registry（新罕布什尔结肠镜检查登记处）；White River Junction VA Medical Center（怀特河交界处退伍军人事务医疗中心）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
Obtaining reliable and accurate quantification of uncertainty estimates from deep neural networks is important in safety-critical applications. A well-calibrated model should be accurate when it is certain about its prediction and indicate high uncertainty when it is likely to be inaccurate. Uncertainty calibration is a challenging problem as there is no ground truth available for uncertainty estimates. We propose an optimization method that leverages the relationship between accuracy and uncertainty as an anchor for uncertainty calibration. We introduce a differentiable accuracy versus uncert…
NeuroPareto: Calibrated Acquisition for Costly Many-Goal Search in Vast Parameter Spaces
University of Macau（澳门大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist大学）
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
The problem of detecting whether a test sample is from in-distribution (i.e., training distribution by a classifier) or out-of-distribution sufficiently different from it arises in many real-world machine learning applications. However, the state-of-art deep neural networks are known to be highly overconfident in their predictions, i.e., do not distinguish in- and out-of-distributions. Recently, to handle this issue, several threshold-based detectors have been proposed given pre-trained neural classifiers. However, the performance of prior works highly depends on how to train the classifiers s…
NYU Langone Health（纽约大学朗格尼健康中心）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；New York University（纽约大学）；Courant Institute, New York University（纽约大学库朗研究所）；NYU Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院）
Artificial intelligence (AI) is showing promise in improving clinical diagnosis. In breast cancer screening, recent studies show that AI has the potential to improve early cancer diagnosis and reduce unnecessary workup. As the number of proposed models and their complexity grows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to re-implement them. To enable reproducibility of research and to enable comparison between different methods, we release a meta-repository containing models for classification of screening mammograms. This meta-repository creates a framework that enables the evaluation of AI mod…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance. In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted. By …
PRECISE Center（PRECISE中心）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Providing reliable model uncertainty estimates is imperative to enabling robust decision making by autonomous agents and humans alike. While recently there have been significant advances in confidence calibration for trained models, examples with poor calibration persist in most calibrated models. Consequently, multiple techniques have been proposed that leverage label-invariant transformations of the input (i.e., an input manifold) to improve worst-case confidence calibration. However, manifold-based confidence calibration techniques generally do not scale and/or require expensive retraining …
