Reliability Estimation of Individual Multi-target Regression Predictions

To estimate the quality of the induced predictive model we generally use measures of averaged prediction accuracy, such as the relative mean squared error on test data. Such evaluation fails to provide local information about reliability of individual predictions, which can be important in risk-sensitive fields (medicine, finance, industry etc.). Related work presented several ways for computing individual prediction reliability estimates for single-target regression models, but has not considered their use with multi-target regression models that predict a vector of independent target variables. In this paper we adapt the existing single-target reliability estimates to multi-target models. In this way we try to design reliability estimates, which can estimate the prediction errors without knowing true prediction errors, for multi-target regression algorithms, as well. We approach this in two ways: by aggregating reliability estimates for individual target components, and by generalizing the existing reliability estimates to higher number of dimensions. The results revealed favorable performance of the reliability estimates that are based on bagging variance and local cross-validation approaches. The results are consistent with the related work in single-target reliability estimates and provide a support for multi-target decision making.