Conditional Predictive Inference for General Structured Data with Group Symmetries

TL;DR

This paper introduces C-SymmPI, a novel framework for distribution-free predictive inference that achieves near-conditional coverage in structured data with group symmetries, extending beyond exchangeability.

Contribution

C-SymmPI extends predictive inference to general structured data with group symmetries, providing near-conditional coverage guarantees and practical algorithms for complex data structures.

Findings

C-SymmPI achieves more stable and informative conditional coverage.

The method demonstrates improved accuracy over existing approaches.

Theoretical guarantees hold under distributional invariance and shift.

Abstract

We study distribution-free predictive inference for data with group symmetries, aiming to establish near-conditional coverage guarantees beyond exchangeability for structured data. While many predictive inference methods achieve a target coverage level, most provide marginal coverage. In practice, conditional predictive inference is often preferred, as it quantifies uncertainty for black-box predictions given observed attributes, thereby accommodating heterogeneity. Although many efforts have pursued efficient conditional coverage, existing methods rely on the i.i.d. or exchangeable assumption, often violated in structured settings such as networks, clusters, and imaging data. Recently, SymmPI introduced a unified approach to predictive inference under group symmetries beyond exchangeability; nevertheless, its guarantees remain marginal and do not account for population heterogeneity. To bridge this gap, we introduce C-SymmPI, a framework that achieves near-conditional coverage under general data structures with group symmetries, extending beyond exchangeability to cover networks, cluster-level data, and related structures. Inspired by relaxed multi-accuracy, our approach reformulates conditional coverage as miscoverage error over a user-specified function class. We establish theoretical guarantees under distributional invariance and distribution shift, and derive convergence rates for linear and RKHS function classes, recovering state-of-the-art results in the exchangeable setting as special cases. For computational efficiency, we develop two variants: a projection-based algorithm for high-dimensional observations, and a sampling-based algorithm for large or infinite groups. We demonstrate effectiveness on hierarchical and network data. Empirical results show that C-SymmPI delivers more informative and stable conditional coverage with improved accuracy compared to existing methods.