Loma Buena Peculiar Inklings

This Blog Post: Are you Certain About How Uncertain You Should Be?  © 2024  by  Lynd Bacon & Loma Buena Associates  is licensed under   CC BY-SA 4.0  TL;DR?  Here's the BLUF: It has been said that love is a many-faceted thing.  So is uncertainty.  Because it is, the multiple sources of it in any data science or analytics effort should be well documented and expressed as precisely as possible.  Doing otherwise is not good practice, and is not in the best interest of supporting the best possible decision-making based on results. Life is chock full of uncertainty.  So are research, prediction, and data analytics. I've recently been considering some challenges in expressing and communicating uncertainty. I've also been thinking about the critical elements of reproducible data science workflows that I need to emphasize for my students and colleagues. I find myself once again reminded of how difficult it can be to understand uncertai...

This Blog Post: Risk Controlled Conformal Prediction of Outcomes for Customers, Patients, or Other Entities  © 2024  by  Lynd Bacon & Loma Buena Associates  is licensed under   CC BY-SA 4.0  TL; DR?  Here's the BLUF: Risk-controlled conformal prediction methods subsume conformal prediction methods as a special case.  They allow controlling for the risk of specified types of prediction errors.   Single or multiple kinds of risk can be accommodated.  Like conformal prediction methods, risk-controlling methods are model agnostic, and they can provide finite sample statistical certainty guarantees.  A simple, and mostly conceptual, description of risk controlled conformal prediction, follows. As noted elsewhere and by many, conformal prediction methods can provide a statistically valid, finite sample certainty guarantees about whether predictions for individual new cases, contain, or cover, the "true" quantity or value to be ...