Estimating Uncertainty with Implicit Quantile Network

Abstract: Uncertainty quantification is an important part of many performance critical applications. This paper provides a simple alternative to existing approaches such as ensemble learning and bayesian neural networks. By directly modeling the loss distribution with an Implicit Quantile Network, we get an estimate of how uncertain the model is of its predictions. For experiments with MNIST and CIFAR datasets, the mean of the estimated loss distribution is 2x higher for incorrect predictions. When data with high estimated uncertainty is removed from the test dataset, the accuracy of the model goes up as much as 10%. This method is simple to implement while offering important information to applications where the user has to know when the model could be wrong (e.g. deep learning for healthcare).