Region-dependent temperature scaling for certainty calibration and application to class-imbalanced token classification

Abstract

Certainty calibration is an important goal on the path to interpretability and trustworthy AI. Particularly in the context of human-in-the-loop systems, high-quality low to mid-range certainty estimates are essential. In the presence of a dominant high-certainty class, for instance the non-entity class in NER problems, existing calibration error measures are completely insensitive to potentially large errors in this certainty region of interest. We introduce a region-balanced calibration error metric that weights all certainty regions equally. When low and mid certainty estimates are taken into account, calibration error is typically larger than previously reported. We introduce a simple extension of temperature scaling, requiring no additional computation, that can reduce both traditional and region-balanced notions of calibration error over existing baselines.