Reference
Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles,
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30(2017)
Abstract
Deep neural networks (NNs) are powerful black box predictors that have recently
achieved impressive performance on a wide spectrum of tasks. Quantifying predictive uncertainty in NNs is a challenging and yet unsolved problem. Bayesian
NNs, which learn a distribution over weights, are currently the state-of-the-art
for estimating predictive uncertainty; however these require significant modifications to the training procedure and are computationally expensive compared to
standard (non-Bayesian) NNs. We propose an alternative to Bayesian NNs that
is simple to implement, readily parallelizable, requires very little hyperparameter
tuning, and yields high quality predictive uncertainty estimates. Through a series
of experiments on classification and regression benchmarks, we demonstrate that
our method produces well-calibrated uncertainty estimates which are as good or
better than approximate Bayesian NNs. To assess robustness to dataset shift, we
evaluate the predictive uncertainty on test examples from known and unknown
distributions, and show that our method is able to express higher uncertainty on
out-of-distribution examples. We demonstrate the scalability of our method by
evaluating predictive uncertainty estimates on ImageNet.