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  • Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK
  • 10 - 12 September 2025
  • 14th Symposium on Conformal and Probabilistic Prediction with Applications

    Starting in:
  • 20th anniversary of Algorithmic Learning in a Random World (2005 - 2025)

Keynote Speakers

Prof David Hand (OBE)

Imperial College London

    Professor Hand is Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, where he formerly held the Chair in Statistics. He served on the Board of the UK Statistics Authority for eight years and was also Chief Scientific Advisor to Winton Capital Management. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries, and has served (twice) as President of the Royal Statistical Society.


    He has published 300 scientific papers and 32 books. In 2002 he was awarded the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2012 he and his research group won the Credit Collections and Risk Award for Contributions to the Credit Industry. He was awarded the George Box Medal in 2016. In 2013 he was made OBE for services to research and innovation.

Assessing the performance of classification rules

The problem of assigning objects to one of a given set of classes is ubiquitous, and arises in many research domains and application areas, including medical diagnosis, financial decision making, online commerce, personnel selection, and national security. But such assignments are rarely completely perfect, and classification errors occur. This means it is necessary to compare classification algorithms to decide which is “best” for any particular problem.

However, just as there are many different classification methods, so there are many different ways of measuring their performance – and using an inappropriate method can lead to costly mistakes. This talk examines the range of such methods, looking at their properties and weaknesses, so that users can make more informed decisions about "which method is best".

Dr Arash Behboodi

Qualcomm AI Research

    Dr. Arash Behboodi is Director of Engineering at Qualcomm AI Research. He is in general interested in theoretical aspects of information and computational systems, in particular information theory, learning theory, and mathematical signal processing.   He has been doing research on machine learning for inverse problems, compressed sensing, geometric deep learning, differentiable simulation and agentic AI.

Information Theoretic Perspective on Conformal Prediction

Conformal Prediction (CP) is a distribution-free uncertainty estimation framework that constructs prediction sets guaranteed to contain the true answer with a user-specified probability. Intuitively, the size of the prediction set encodes a general notion of uncertainty, with larger sets associated with higher degrees of uncertainty.

In this talk, we leverage information theory to connect the efficiency of confidence predictors to other notions of uncertainty. We provide different bounds that relate different measures of the prediction set size to information theoretical quantities and discuss extension to transductive prediction problems. These bounds reveal fundamental limits on the efficiency of confidence predictors. Some applications of these bounds are also considered. Finally, we re-consider the problem of hypothesis testing with empirically observed statistics in connection with transductive conformal prediction.

14th Symposium on Conformal and Probabilistic Prediction with Applications

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