SEMF: Supervised Expectation-Maximization Framework for Predicting Intervals

This work introduces the Supervised Expectation-Maximization Framework (SEMF), a versatile and model-agnostic framework that generates prediction intervals for datasets with complete or missing data. SEMF extends the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, traditionally used in unsupervised learning, to a supervised context, enabling it to extract latent representations for uncertainty estimation. The framework demonstrates robustness through extensive empirical evaluation across 11 tabular datasets, achieving$\unicode{x2013}$in some cases$\unicode{x2013}$narrower normalized prediction intervals and higher coverage than traditional quantile regression methods. Furthermore, SEMF integrates seamlessly with existing machine learning algorithms, such as gradient-boosted trees and neural networks, exemplifying its usefulness for real-world applications. The experimental results highlight SEMF's potential to advance state-of-the-art techniques in uncertainty quantification.

UncertaintyPlayground: A Fast and Simplified Python Library for Uncertainty Estimation

This paper introduces UncertaintyPlayground, a Python library built on PyTorch and GPyTorch for uncertainty estimation in supervised learning tasks. The library offers fast training for Gaussian and multi-modal outcome distributions through Sparse and Variational Gaussian Process Regressions (SVGPRs) for normally distributed outcomes and Mixed Density Networks (MDN) for mixed distributions. In addition to model training with various hyperparameters, UncertaintyPlayground can visualize the prediction intervals of one or more instances. Due to using tensor operations, the library can be trained both on CPU and GPU and offers various PyTorch-specific techniques for speed optimization. The library contains unit tests for each module and ensures multi-platform continuous integration with GitHub Workflows (online integration) and Tox (local integration). Finally, the code is documented with Google-style docstrings and offers a documentation website created with MkDocs and MkDocStrings.