Estimation of Accurate and Calibrated Uncertainties in Deterministic models

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the problem of assigning uncertainties to single-point predictions generated by a deterministic model that outputs a continuous variable. This problem applies to any state-of-the-art physics or engineering models that have a computational cost that does not readily allow to run ensembles and to estimate the uncertainty associated to single-point predictions. Essentially, we devise a method to easily transform a deterministic prediction into a probabilistic one. We show that for doing so, one has to compromise between the accuracy and the reliability (calibration) of such a probabilistic model. Hence, we introduce a cost function that encodes their trade-off. We use the Continuous Rank Probability Score to measure accuracy and we derive an analytic formula for the reliability, in the case of forecasts of continuous scalar variables expressed in terms of Gaussian distributions. The new Accuracy-Reliability cost function is then used to estimate the input-dependent variance, given a black-box mean function, by solving a two-objective optimization problem. The simple philosophy behind this strategy is that predictions based on the estimated variances should not only be accurate, but also reliable (i.e. statistical consistent with observations). Conversely, early works based on the minimization of classical cost functions, such as the negative log probability density, cannot simultaneously enforce both accuracy and reliability. We show several examples both with synthetic data, where the underlying hidden noise can accurately be recovered, and with large real-world datasets.