Mix-n-Match: Ensemble and Compositional Methods for Uncertainty Calibration in Deep Learning

This paper studies the problem of post-hoc calibration of machine learning classifiers. We introduce the following desiderata for uncertainty calibration: (a) accuracy-preserving, (b) data-efficient, and (c) high expressive power. We show that none of the existing methods satisfy all three requirements, and demonstrate how Mix-n-Match calibration strategies (i.e., ensemble and composition) can help achieve remarkably better data-efficiency and expressive power while provably preserving classification accuracy of the original classifier. We also show that existing calibration error estimators (e.g., histogram-based ECE) are unreliable especially in small-data regime. Therefore, we propose an alternative data-efficient kernel density-based estimator for a reliable evaluation of the calibration performance and prove its asymptotically unbiasedness and consistency.