Inductive Conformal Prediction: A Straightforward Introduction with Examples in Python
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Inductive Conformal Prediction (ICP) is a set of distribution-free and model agnostic algorithms devised to predict with a user-defined confidence with coverage guarantee. Instead of having point predictions, i.e., a real number in the case of regression or a single class in multi class classification, models calibrated using ICP output an interval or a set of classes, respectively. ICP takes special importance in high-risk settings where we want the true output to belong to the prediction set with high probability. As an example, a classification model might output that given a magnetic resonance image a patient has no latent diseases to report. However, this model output was based on the most likely class, the second most likely class might tell that the patient has a 15 further exams should be conducted. Using ICP is therefore way more informative and we believe that should be the standard way of producing forecasts. This paper is a hands-on introduction, this means that we will provide examples as we introduce the theory.
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