Papers › Classification with Valid and Adaptive Coverage

Classification with Valid and Adaptive Coverage

3 Jun 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2006.02544archive 2025-07-28

Yaniv Romano, Matteo Sesia, Emmanuel J. Candès

Conformal inference, cross-validation+, and the jackknife+ are hold-out methods that can be combined with virtually any machine learning algorithm to construct prediction sets with guaranteed marginal coverage. In this paper, we develop specialized versions of these techniques for categorical and unordered response labels that, in addition to providing marginal coverage, are also fully adaptive to complex data distributions, in the sense that they perform favorably in terms of approximate conditional coverage compared to alternative methods. The heart of our contribution is a novel conformity score, which we explicitly demonstrate to be powerful and intuitive for classification problems, but whose underlying principle is potentially far more general. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the practical value of our theoretical guarantees, as well as the statistical advantages of the proposed methods over the existing alternatives.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

msesia/arc officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
cambridge-mlg/acp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationGeneral Classification

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections