Model-agnostic nonconformity functions for conformal classification

A conformal predictor outputs prediction regions, for classification label sets. The key property of all conformal predictors is that they are valid, i.e., their error rate on novel data is bounded by a preset significance level. Thus, the key performance metric for evaluating conformal predictors is the size of the output prediction regions, where smaller (more informative) prediction regions are said to be more efficient. All conformal predictions rely on nonconformity functions, measuring the strangeness of an input-output pair, and the efficiency depends critically on the quality of the chosen nonconformity function. In this paper, three model-agnostic nonconformity functions, based on well-known loss functions, are evaluated with regard to how they affect efficiency. In the experimentation on 21 publicly available multi-class data sets, both single neural networks and ensembles of neural networks are used as underlying models for conformal classifiers. The results show that the choice of nonconformity function has a major impact on the efficiency, but also that different nonconformity functions should be used depending on the exact efficiency metric. For a high fraction of single-label predictions, a margin-based nonconformity function is the best option, while a nonconformity function based on the hinge loss obtained the smallest label sets on average.