On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks

Chuan Guo, Geoff Pleiss, Yu Sun, Kilian Q. Weinberger
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 70:1321-1330, 2017.

Abstract

Confidence calibration – the problem of predicting probability estimates representative of the true correctness likelihood – is important for classification models in many applications. We discover that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated. Through extensive experiments, we observe that depth, width, weight decay, and Batch Normalization are important factors influencing calibration. We evaluate the performance of various post-processing calibration methods on state-of-the-art architectures with image and document classification datasets. Our analysis and experiments not only offer insights into neural network learning, but also provide a simple and straightforward recipe for practical settings: on most datasets, temperature scaling – a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling – is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v70-guo17a, title = {On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks}, author = {Chuan Guo and Geoff Pleiss and Yu Sun and Kilian Q. Weinberger}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {1321--1330}, year = {2017}, editor = {Precup, Doina and Teh, Yee Whye}, volume = {70}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {06--11 Aug}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/guo17a/guo17a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/guo17a.html}, abstract = {Confidence calibration – the problem of predicting probability estimates representative of the true correctness likelihood – is important for classification models in many applications. We discover that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated. Through extensive experiments, we observe that depth, width, weight decay, and Batch Normalization are important factors influencing calibration. We evaluate the performance of various post-processing calibration methods on state-of-the-art architectures with image and document classification datasets. Our analysis and experiments not only offer insights into neural network learning, but also provide a simple and straightforward recipe for practical settings: on most datasets, temperature scaling – a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling – is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks %A Chuan Guo %A Geoff Pleiss %A Yu Sun %A Kilian Q. Weinberger %B Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2017 %E Doina Precup %E Yee Whye Teh %F pmlr-v70-guo17a %I PMLR %P 1321--1330 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/guo17a.html %V 70 %X Confidence calibration – the problem of predicting probability estimates representative of the true correctness likelihood – is important for classification models in many applications. We discover that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated. Through extensive experiments, we observe that depth, width, weight decay, and Batch Normalization are important factors influencing calibration. We evaluate the performance of various post-processing calibration methods on state-of-the-art architectures with image and document classification datasets. Our analysis and experiments not only offer insights into neural network learning, but also provide a simple and straightforward recipe for practical settings: on most datasets, temperature scaling – a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling – is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.
APA
Guo, C., Pleiss, G., Sun, Y. & Weinberger, K.Q.. (2017). On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks. Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 70:1321-1330 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/guo17a.html.

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