Conformal Prediction with Missing Values
Margaux Zaffran Aymeric Dieuleveut Julie Josse Yaniv Romano
Conformal prediction is a theoretically grounded framework for constructing
predictive intervals. We study conformal prediction with missing values in the
covariates -- a setting that brings new challenges to uncertainty
quantification. We first show that the marginal coverage guarantee of conformal
prediction holds on imputed data for any missingness distribution and almost
all imputation functions. However, we emphasize that the average coverage
varies depending on the pattern of missing values: conformal methods tend to
construct prediction intervals that under-cover the response conditionally to
some missing patterns. This motivates our novel generalized conformalized
quantile regression framework, missing data augmentation, which yields
prediction intervals that are valid conditionally to the patterns of missing
values, despite their exponential number. We then show that a universally
consistent quantile regression algorithm trained on the imputed data is Bayes
optimal for the pinball risk, thus achieving valid coverage conditionally to
any given data point. Moreover, we examine the case of a linear model, which
demonstrates the importance of our proposal in overcoming the
heteroskedasticity induced by missing values. Using synthetic and data from
critical care, we corroborate our theory and report improved performance of our
methods.