In machine learning applications, the reliability of predictions is significant for assisted decision and risk control. As an effective framework to quantify the prediction reliability, conformal prediction (CP) was developed with the CPKNN (CP with kNN). However, the conventional CPKNN suffers from high variance and bias and long computational time as the feature dimensionality increases. To address these limitations, a new CP framework-conformal prediction with shrunken centroids (CPSC) is proposed. It regularizes the class centroids to attenuate the irrelevant features and shrink the sample space for predictions and reliability quantification. To compare CPKNN and CPSC, we employed them in the classification of 12 categories of alternative herbal medicine with electronic nose as a case and assessed them in two tasks: 1) offline prediction: the training set was fixed and the accuracy on the testing set was evaluated; 2) online prediction with data augmentation: they filtered unlabeled data to augment the training data based on the prediction reliability and the final accuracy of testing set was compared. The result shows that CPSC significantly outperformed CPKNN in both two tasks: 1) CPSC reached a significantly higher accuracy with lower computation cost, and with the same credibility output, CPSC generally achieves a higher accuracy; 2) the data augmentation process with CPSC robustly manifested a statistically significant improvement in prediction accuracy with different reliability thresholds, and the augmented data were more balanced in classes. This novel CPSC provides higher prediction accuracy and better reliability quantification, which can be a reliable assistance in decision support.
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