Pitfalls of Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification Through Loss Minimisation
MCML Authors
Viktor Bengs
Dr.
Eyke Hüllermeier
Prof. Dr.
Principal Investigator
Abstract
Viktor Bengs
Dr.
Eyke Hüllermeier
Prof. Dr.
Principal Investigator
Abstract
Uncertainty quantification has received increasing attention in machine learning in the recent past. In particular, a distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has been found useful in this regard. The latter refers to the learner's (lack of) knowledge and appears to be especially difficult to measure and quantify. In this paper, we analyse a recent proposal based on the idea of a second-order learner, which yields predictions in the form of distributions over probability distributions. While standard (first-order) learners can be trained to predict accurate probabilities, namely by minimising suitable loss functions on sample data, we show that loss minimisation does not work for second-order predictors: The loss functions proposed for inducing such predictors do not incentivise the learner to represent its epistemic uncertainty in a faithful way.
inproceedings
NeurIPS 2022
36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. New Orleans, LA, USA, Nov 28-Dec 09, 2022.
Authors
V. Bengs • E. Hüllermeier • W. WaegemanLinks
URLResearch Area
BibTeXKey: BHW22