Reference

Beyond temperature scaling: Obtaining well-calibrated multi-class probabilities with Dirichlet calibration, Meelis Kull, Miquel Perello Nieto, Markus Kängsepp, Telmo Silva Filho, Hao Song, Peter Flach. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32(2019)

Abstract

Class probabilities predicted by most multiclass classifiers are uncalibrated, often tending towards over-confidence. With neural networks, calibration can be im proved by temperature scaling, a method to learn a single corrective multiplicative factor for inputs to the last softmax layer. On non-neural models the existing methods apply binary calibration in a pairwise or one-vs-rest fashion. We propose a natively multiclass calibration method applicable to classifiers from any model class, derived from Dirichlet distributions and generalising the beta calibration method from binary classification. It is easily implemented with neural nets since it is equivalent to log-transforming the uncalibrated probabilities, followed by one lin ear layer and softmax. Experiments demonstrate improved probabilistic predictions according to multiple measures (confidence-ECE, classwise-ECE, log-loss, Brier score) across a wide range of datasets and classifiers. Parameters of the learned Dirichlet calibration map provide insights to the biases in the uncalibrated model.