Protected probabilistic classification

Abstract

This paper proposes a way of protecting probabilistic prediction models against changes in the data distribution, concentrating on the case of classification and paying particular attention to binary classification. This is important in applications of machine learning, where the quality of a trained prediction algorithm may drop significantly in the process of its exploitation. Our techniques are based on recent work on conformal test martingales and older work on prediction with expert advice, namely tracking the best expert.

23 pages, 14 figures, and 4 tables