"Calibeating": Beating Forecasters at Their Own Game

Speaker
Sergiu Hart
Date
01/04/2025 - 12:30 - 11:15Add To Calendar 2025-04-01 11:15:00 2025-04-01 12:30:00 "Calibeating": Beating Forecasters at Their Own Game In order to identify expertise, forecasters should not be tested by their calibration score, which can always be made arbitrarily small, but rather by their Brier score. The Brier score is the sum of the calibration score and the refinement score; the latter measures how good the sorting into bins with the same forecast is, and thus attests to "expertise." This raises the question of whether one can gain calibration without losing expertise, which we refer to as "calibeating." We provide an easy way to calibeat any forecast, by a deterministic online procedure. We moreover show that calibeating can be achieved by a stochastic procedure that is itself calibrated, and then extend the results to simultaneously calibeating multiple procedures, and to deterministic procedures that are continuously calibrated. (with Dean P. Foster) Link to the paper: http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/hart/abs/calib-beat.htmlSergiu Hart's homepage:  http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/hart BIU Economics common room אוניברסיטת בר-אילן - Department of Economics Economics.Dept@mail.biu.ac.il Asia/Jerusalem public
Place
BIU Economics common room
Affiliation
Hebrew University
Abstract
In order to identify expertise, forecasters should not be tested by their calibration score, which can always be made arbitrarily small, but rather by their Brier score. The Brier score is the sum of the calibration score and the refinement score; the latter measures how good the sorting into bins with the same forecast is, and thus attests to "expertise." This raises the question of whether one can gain calibration without losing expertise, which we refer to as "calibeating." We provide an easy way to calibeat any forecast, by a deterministic online procedure. We moreover show that calibeating can be achieved by a stochastic procedure that is itself calibrated, and then extend the results to simultaneously calibeating multiple procedures, and to deterministic procedures that are continuously calibrated.
 
(with Dean P. Foster)
 
Sergiu Hart's homepage:  http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/hart

Last Updated Date : 25/03/2025