Keynote by Kilian Weinberger: On Calibration and Fairness

We investigate calibration for deep learning algorithms in classification and regression settings. Although we show that typically deep networks tend to be highly mis-calibrated, we demonstrate that this is easy to fix - either to obtain more trustworthy confidence estimates or to detect outliers in the data. Finally, we relate calibration with the recently raised tension between minimizing error disparity across different population groups while maintaining calibrated probability estimates. We show that calibration is compatible only with a single error constraint (i.e. equal false-negatives rates across groups), and show that any algorithm that satisfies this relaxation is no better than randomizing a percentage of predictions for an existing classifier. These unsettling findings, which extend and generalize existing results, are empirically confirmed on several datasets.