Computational Intelligence and Learning

Souhaib Ben Taieb (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence)
"Introduction to Conformal Prediction"


Quantifying uncertainty in machine learning predictions is essential for trustworthy and robust decision-making. However, obtaining valid uncertainty estimates with non-asymptotic coverage guarantees across diverse data distributions remains a significant challenge.

Conformal Prediction offers a flexible, model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification, providing distribution-free, finite-sample statistical guarantees. It constructs prediction sets that contain the true outcome with a user-specified error level—regardless of the underlying data distribution or predictive model.

This talk introduces the core principles of conformal prediction and examines recent extensions to multi-response regression, where modeling dependencies among multiple outputs is key. We will review several methods for constructing prediction regions in this setting, highlighting their practical tradeoffs and theoretical properties.