The belief function approach to uncertainty quantification as proposed in the Demspter-Shafer theory of evidence is established upon the general mathematical models for set-valued observations, called random sets. Set-valued predictions are the most natural representations of uncertainty in machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a concept called epistemic deep learning based on the random-set interpretation of belief functions to model epistemic learning in deep neural networks. We propose a novel random-set convolutional neural network for classification that produces scores for sets of classes by learning set-valued ground truth representations. We evaluate different formulations of entropy and distance measures for belief functions as viable loss functions for these random-set networks. We also discuss methods for evaluating the quality of epistemic predictions and the performance of epistemic random-set neural networks. We demonstrate through experiments that the epistemic approach produces better performance results when compared to traditional approaches of estimating uncertainty.

该论文介绍了一种基于随机集合解释置信度函数的认知深度学习概念，提出了一种新的随机集合卷积神经网络用于分类，并通过实验表明该认知方法在估计不确定性方面比传统方法具有更好的性能。