TRACE-CRC: Trajectory-Adaptive Conformal Risk Control for Multi-Step Channel State Information Prediction

Abstract

Reliable prediction of time-varying channel state information (CSI) is essential for efficient wireless communication. Each CSI frame is a matrix-valued representation of the wireless channel response, and a sequence of CSI frames forms a temporal channel trajectory. Modern deep learning-based CSI predictors, however, often provide only point predictions and lack calibrated uncertainty estimates. This limitation is particularly problematic in multi-step CSI prediction, where the target is a sequence of future CSI matrices, and downstream decisions such as beamforming or scheduling may fail if any part of the predicted trajectory is unreliable. We propose trajectory-adaptive calibration and error profiling with conformal risk control (TRACE-CRC), a method for trajectory-aware uncertainty quantification in multi-step CSI prediction. TRACE-CRC constructs Frobenius-norm uncertainty balls around predicted CSI matrices and controls the risk that at least one future frame is uncovered. Instead of calibrating each future step independently, TRACE-CRC combines future-step-dependent error profiling, trajectory difficulty stratification, and learn-then-test (LTT) risk control. Empirically, TRACE-CRC achieves reliable trajectory-level coverage with substantially smaller uncertainty balls than conservative multi-step corrections, while avoiding the trajectory undercoverage of compact stepwise and adaptive conformal baselines.

Published in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR), volume 329, Conformal and Probabilistic Prediction with Applications (COPA 2026)