Online conformal inference with retrospective adjustment for faster adaptation to distribution shift

Abstract

Conformal prediction has emerged as a powerful framework for constructing distribution-free prediction sets with guaranteed coverage assuming only the exchangeability assumption. However, this assumption is often violated in online environments where data distributions evolve over time. Several recent approaches have been proposed to address this limitation, but, typically, they slowly adapt to distribution shifts because they update predictions only in a forward manner, that is, they generate a prediction for a newly observed data point while previously computed predictions are not updated. In this paper, we propose a novel online conformal inference method with retrospective adjustment, which is designed to achieve faster adaptation to distributional shifts. Our method leverages regression approaches with efficient leave-one-out update formulas to retroactively adjust past predictions when new data arrive, thereby aligning the entire set of predictions with the most recent data distribution. Through extensive numerical studies performed on both synthetic and real-world data sets, we show that the proposed approach achieves coverage close to the nominal level while reducing predictive interval width by up to approximately 30\% compared to existing online conformal prediction methods, demonstrating improved statistical efficiency alongside faster adaptation.