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Probabilistic Neighbourhood Component Analysis: Sample Efficient Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning

While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in various applications, they often fall short in accurately estimating their predictive uncertainty and, in turn, fail to recognize when these predictions may be wrong. Several uncertainty-aware models, such as Bayesian Neural Network (BNNs) and Deep Ensembles have been proposed in the literature for quantifying predictive uncertainty. However, research in this area has been largely confined to the big data regime. In this work, we show that the uncertainty estimation capability of state-of-the-art BNNs and Deep Ensemble models degrades significantly when the amount of training data is small. To address the issue of accurate uncertainty estimation in the small-data regime, we propose a probabilistic generalization of the popular sample-efficient non-parametric kNN approach. Our approach enables deep kNN classifier to accurately quantify underlying uncertainties in its prediction. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by achieving superior uncertainty quantification as compared to state-of-the-art on a real-world application of COVID-19 diagnosis from chest X-Rays. Our code is available at https://github.com/ankurmallick/sample-efficient-uq