Abstract
In this paper, we propose a practically useful means of interpreting the predictions produced by a conformal classifier. The proposed interpretation leads to a classifier with a reject option, that allows the user to limit the number of erroneous predictions made on the test set, without any need to reveal the true labels of the test objects. The method described in this paper works by estimating the cumulative error count on a set of predictions provided by a conformal classifier, ordered by their confidence. Given a test set and a user-specified parameter k, the proposed classification procedure outputs the largest possible amount of predictions containing on average at most k errors, while refusing to make predictions for test objects where it is too uncertain. We conduct an empirical evaluation using benchmark datasets, and show that we are able to provide accurate estimates for the error rate on the test set.
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This work was supported by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation through the project Data Analytics for Research and Development (20150185).
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Linusson, H., Johansson, U., Boström, H., Löfström, T. (2018). Classification with Reject Option Using Conformal Prediction. In: Phung, D., Tseng, V., Webb, G., Ho, B., Ganji, M., Rashidi, L. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10937. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93034-3_8
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