While the traditional viewpoint in machine learning and statistics assumes training and testing samples come from the same population, practice belies this fiction. One strategy---coming from robust statistics and optimization---is thus to build a model robust to distributional perturbations. In this paper, we take a different approach to describe procedures for robust predictive inference, where a model provides uncertainty estimates on its predictions rather than point predictions. We present a method that produces prediction sets (almost exactly) giving the right coverage level for any test distribution in an $f$-divergence ball around the training population. The method, based on conformal inference, achieves (nearly) valid coverage in finite samples, under only the condition that the training data be exchangeable. An essential component of our methodology is to estimate the amount of expected future data shift and build robustness to it; we develop estimators and prove their consistency for protection and validity of uncertainty estimates under shifts. By experimenting on several large-scale benchmark datasets, including Recht et al.'s CIFAR-v4 and ImageNet-V2 datasets, we provide complementary empirical results that highlight the importance of robust predictive validity.

本文提出了一种建立在鲁棒性预测推断上的不确定性估计模型，使用 conformal inference 方法建立了准确覆盖测试数据分布的预测集，通过估计数据漂移量建立了鲁棒性，并在多个基准数据集上进行了实验证明了该方法的重要性。

稳健验证：即使分布发生偏移，也能自信地做出预测