Evaluation of a Variance-Based Nonconformity Measure for Regression Forests

Abstract

In a previous large-scale empirical evaluation of conformal regression approaches, random forests using out-of-bag instances for calibration together with a k-nearest neighbor-based nonconformity measure, was shown to obtain state-of-the-art performance with respect to efficiency, i.e., average size of prediction regions. However, the use of the nearest-neighbor procedure not only requires that all training data have to be retained in conjunction with the underlying model, but also that a significant computational overhead is incurred, during both training and testing. In this study, a more straightforward nonconformity measure is investigated, where the difficulty estimate employed for normalization is based on the variance of the predictions made by the trees in a forest. A large-scale empirical evaluation is presented, showing that both the nearest-neighbor-based and the variance-based measures significantly outperform a standard (non-normalized) nonconformity measure, while no significant difference in efficiency between the two normalized approaches is observed. Moreover, the evaluation shows that state-of-the-art performance is achieved by the variance-based measure at a computational cost that is several orders of magnitude lower than when employing the nearest-neighbor-based nonconformity measure.