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Oral
in
Workshop: Bayesian Decision-making and Uncertainty: from probabilistic and spatiotemporal modeling to sequential experiment design

Rethinking Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty

Freddie Bickford Smith · Jannik Kossen · Eleanor Trollope · Mark van der Wilk · Adam Foster · Thomas Rainforth

Keywords: [ Uncertainty Estimation ] [ machine learning ]


Abstract:

The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We highlight that the common understanding of these ideas ("the standard view") makes a number of spurious associations, including between the data-generating process and a model's predictive uncertainty, between parameter stochasticity and the reducibility of predictive uncertainty, and between subjective uncertainty estimates and objective measures of predictive performance. To address this we derive a simple, principled framework for reasoning about sources of predictive uncertainty.

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