Evaluating Black-Box Classifiers via Stable Adaptive Two-Sample Inference

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new statistical testing methodology for evaluating black-box multi-class classifiers by reducing the problem to two-sample distribution testing using auxiliary classifiers and conformal inference techniques.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach combining ideas from fairness, Neyman-Pearson, and conformal p-values to rigorously test classifier performance without assumptions on training algorithms.

Findings

The method provides an asymptotically valid test under stability conditions.

It leverages a distinguisher trained via cross-validation to compare distributions.

The approach is applicable to black-box classifiers with minimal assumptions.

Abstract

We consider the problem of evaluating black-box multi-class classifiers. In the standard setup, we observe class labels $Y\in \{0,1,\ldots,M-1\}$ generated according to the conditional distribution $ Y|X \sim \text{ Multinom}\big(\eta(X)\big), $ where $X$ denotes the features and $\eta$ maps from the feature space to the $(M-1)$-dimensional simplex. A black-box classifier is an estimate $\hat{\eta}$ for which we make no assumptions about the training algorithm. Given holdout data, our goal is to evaluate the performance of the classifier $\hat{\eta}$. Recent work suggests treating this as a goodness-of-fit problem by testing the hypothesis $H_0: \rho((X,Y),(X',Y')) \le \delta$, where $\rho$ is some metric between two distributions, and $(X',Y')\sim P_X\times \text{ Multinom}(\hat\eta(X))$. Combining ideas from algorithmic fairness, Neyman-Pearson lemma, and conformal p-values, we propose a new methodology for this testing problem. The key idea is to generate a second sample $(X',Y') \sim P_X \times \text{ Multinom}\big(\hat\eta(X)\big)$ allowing us to reduce the task to two-sample conditional distribution testing. Using part of the data, we train an auxiliary binary classifier called a distinguisher to attempt to distinguish between the two samples. The distinguisher's ability to differentiate samples, measured using a rank-sum statistic, is then used to assess the difference between $\hat{\eta}$ and $\eta$ . Using techniques from cross-validation central limit theorems, we derive an asymptotically rigorous test under suitable stability conditions of the distinguisher.