In the past decades, most work in the area of data analysis and machine learning was focused on optimizing predictive models and getting better results than what was possible with existing models. To what extent the metrics with which such improvements were measured were accurately capturing the intended goal, whether the numerical differences in the resulting values were significant, or whether uncertainty played a role in this study and if it should have been taken into account, was of secondary importance. Whereas probability theory, be it frequentist or Bayesian, used to be the gold standard in science before the advent of the supercomputer, it was quickly replaced in favor of black box models and sheer computing power because of their ability to handle large data sets. This evolution sadly happened at the expense of interpretability and trustworthiness. However, while people are still trying to improve the predictive power of their models, the community is starting to realize that for many applications it is not so much the exact prediction that is of importance, but rather the variability or uncertainty. The work in this dissertation tries to further the quest for a world where everyone is aware of uncertainty, of how important it is and how to embrace it instead of fearing it. A specific, though general, framework that allows anyone to obtain accurate uncertainty estimates is singled out and analysed. Certain aspects and applications of the framework -- dubbed `conformal prediction' -- are studied in detail. Whereas many approaches to uncertainty quantification make strong assumptions about the data, conformal prediction is, at the time of writing, the only framework that deserves the title `distribution-free'. No parametric assumptions have to be made and the nonparametric results also hold without having to resort to the law of large numbers in the asymptotic regime.

过去几十年，数据分析和机器学习领域的大部分工作都致力于优化预测模型，并取得比现有模型更好的结果。然而，本文指出对于很多应用而言，更加重要的并非准确的预测，而是变异性或不确定性。本文进一步探讨了让每个人了解不确定性、意识到其重要性并学会拥抱而不是害怕不确定性的世界，对一种确定性估计准确性的具体框架——被称为“符合性预测”的框架进行了细致研究。而且，无需对数据进行参数假设，这一非参数结果在渐近程度上也不必依赖大数定律，使得这个框架成为唯一值得称为“无分布假设”的框架。

机器学习中有效不确定性量化的共形预测方法的比较研究