Uncertainty Quantification With Multiple Sources

arXiv stat.ML / 4/2/2026

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Key Points

  • Weighted conformal prediction (WCP) is effective for uncertainty quantification under covariate shift, but performance degrades when training and test covariate distributions overlap poorly.
  • The paper tackles the multi-source case by assuming a shared conditional distribution and extending WCP to work when sources have differing covariate distributions.
  • Two methods are proposed: (1) a merge-based aggregation of source-specific WCP sets and (2) a data-pooling approach that jointly reweights samples across sources.
  • The authors provide theoretical guarantees for both extensions and validate them through experiments on a synthetic regression task and a multi-domain image classification benchmark.

Abstract

Weighted conformal prediction (WCP) has been commonly used to quantify prediction uncertainty under covariate shift. However, the effectiveness of WCP relies heavily on the degree of overlap between the training and test covariate distributions. This challenge is exacerbated in multi-source settings with varying covariate distributions, where direct application of WCP can be impractical. In this paper, we address the multi-source setup by leveraging WCP under the assumption of a shared conditional distribution. We investigate two extensions of WCP: (i) a merge-based aggregation of source-specific weighted conformal prediction sets, and (ii) a data-pooling strategy that jointly reweights samples across all sources. Theoretical guarantees are provided for the proposed approaches, and experiments are conducted based on a synthetic regression task and a multi-domain image classification benchmark to validate our proposed methods.