Papers › MACEst: The reliable and trustworthy Model Agnostic Confidence Estimator

MACEst: The reliable and trustworthy Model Agnostic Confidence Estimator

2 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.01531archive 2025-07-28

Rhys Green, Matthew Rowe, Alberto Polleri

Reliable Confidence Estimates are hugely important for any machine learning model to be truly useful. In this paper, we argue that any confidence estimates based upon standard machine learning point prediction algorithms are fundamentally flawed and under situations with a large amount of epistemic uncertainty are likely to be untrustworthy. To address these issues, we present MACEst, a Model Agnostic Confidence Estimator, which provides reliable and trustworthy confidence estimates. The algorithm differs from current methods by estimating confidence independently as a local quantity which explicitly accounts for both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. This approach differs from standard calibration methods that use a global point prediction model as a starting point for the confidence estimate.

PaperPDFCode

Code

oracle/macest officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub 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

BIG-bench Machine Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: MACEst

MACEst

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