CP4SBI: Local Conformal Calibration of Credible Sets in Simulation-Based Inference
About
Current experimental scientists have been increasingly relying on simulation-based inference (SBI) to invert complex non-linear models with intractable likelihoods. However, posterior approximations obtained with SBI are often miscalibrated, causing credible regions to undercover true parameters. We develop $\texttt{CP4SBI}$, a model-agnostic conformal calibration framework that constructs credible sets with local Bayesian coverage. Our two proposed variants, namely local calibration via regression trees and CDF-based calibration, enable finite-sample local coverage guarantees for any scoring function, including HPD, symmetric, and quantile-based regions. Experiments on widely used SBI benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of uncertainty quantification for neural posterior estimators using both normalizing flows and score-diffusion modeling.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Posterior Estimation | Two Moons | Area of HPD Region0.038 | 10 | |
| Posterior Estimation | Gaussian Mixture | Area of HPD Region9.504 | 10 | |
| Posterior Estimation | SIR | Area of HPD region0.039 | 10 |