PAC Prediction Sets Under Label Shift
Wenwen Si Sangdon Park Insup Lee Edgar Dobriban Osbert Bastani
Prediction sets capture uncertainty by predicting sets of labels rather than
individual labels, enabling downstream decisions to conservatively account for
all plausible outcomes. Conformal inference algorithms construct prediction
sets guaranteed to contain the true label with high probability. These
guarantees fail to hold in the face of distribution shift, which is precisely
when reliable uncertainty quantification can be most useful. We propose a novel
algorithm for constructing prediction sets with PAC guarantees in the label
shift setting. This method estimates the predicted probabilities of the classes
in a target domain, as well as the confusion matrix, then propagates
uncertainty in these estimates through a Gaussian elimination algorithm to
compute confidence intervals for importance weights. Finally, it uses these
intervals to construct prediction sets. We evaluate our approach on five
datasets: the CIFAR-10, ChestX-Ray and Entity-13 image datasets, the tabular
CDC Heart dataset, and the AGNews text dataset. Our algorithm satisfies the PAC
guarantee while producing smaller, more informative, prediction sets compared
to several baselines.