Batch Multivalid Conformal PredictionWe develop fast distribution-free conformal prediction algorithms for
obtaining multivalid coverage on exchangeable data in the batch setting.
Multivalid coverage guarantees are stronger than marginal coverage guarantees
in two ways: (1) They hold even conditional on group membership -- that is, the
target coverage level $1-α$ holds conditionally on membership in each of
an arbitrary (potentially intersecting) group in a finite collection
$\mathcal{G}$ of regions in the feature space. (2) They hold even conditional
on the value of the threshold used to produce the prediction set on a given
example. In fact multivalid coverage guarantees hold even when conditioning on
group membership and threshold value simultaneously.
We give two algorithms: both take as input an arbitrary non-conformity score
and an arbitrary collection of possibly intersecting groups $\mathcal{G}$, and
then can equip arbitrary black-box predictors with prediction sets. Our first
algorithm (BatchGCP) is a direct extension of quantile regression, needs to
solve only a single convex minimization problem, and produces an estimator
which has group-conditional guarantees for each group in $\mathcal{G}$. Our
second algorithm (BatchMVP) is iterative, and gives the full guarantees of
multivalid conformal prediction: prediction sets that are valid conditionally
both on group membership and non-conformity threshold. We evaluate the
performance of both of our algorithms in an extensive set of experiments. Code
to replicate all of our experiments can be found at
https://github.com/ProgBelarus/BatchMultivalidConformal
arxiv.org