Uncertainty Regularized Evidential Regression
This is an incremental improvement for uncertainty quantification in regression tasks using evidential deep learning.
The paper tackles the performance limitation of Evidential Regression Networks (ERN) due to constraints from required activation functions, and introduces a regularization term that enables learning from the entire training set, with experiments showing effectiveness.
The Evidential Regression Network (ERN) represents a novel approach that integrates deep learning with Dempster-Shafer's theory to predict a target and quantify the associated uncertainty. Guided by the underlying theory, specific activation functions must be employed to enforce non-negative values, which is a constraint that compromises model performance by limiting its ability to learn from all samples. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of this limitation and introduces an improvement to overcome it. Initially, we define the region where the models can't effectively learn from the samples. Following this, we thoroughly analyze the ERN and investigate this constraint. Leveraging the insights from our analysis, we address the limitation by introducing a novel regularization term that empowers the ERN to learn from the whole training set. Our extensive experiments substantiate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.