Efficient Distributional Regression Trees Learning Algorithms for Calibrated Non-Parametric Probabilistic Forecasts
针对科学工程中需要不确定性估计的回归问题，提出基于加权区间分数和连续排序概率分数的概率回归树学习算法，利用数据结构优化计算效率，实验表明性能与现有方法相当。
The perspective of developing trustworthy AI for critical applications in science and engineering requires machine learning techniques that are capable of estimating their own uncertainty. In the context of regression, instead of estimating a conditional mean, this can be achieved by producing a predictive interval for the output, or to even learn a model of the conditional probability p(y|x) of an output y given input features x. While this can be done under parametric assumptions with, e.g. generalized linear model, these are typically too strong, and non-parametric models offer flexible alternatives. In particular, for scalar outputs, learning directly a model of the conditional cumulative distribution function of y given x can lead to more precise probabilistic estimates, and the use of proper scoring rules such as the weighted interval score (WIS) and the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) lead to better coverage and calibration properties.This paper introduces novel algorithms for learning probabilistic regression trees for the WIS or CRPS loss functions. These algorithms are made computationally efficient thanks to an appropriate use of known data structures - namely min-max heaps, weight-balanced binary trees and Fenwick trees.Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the performance of our methods is competitive with alternative approaches.