# What is Your Metric Telling You? Evaluating Classifier Calibration under Context-Specific Definitions of Reliability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Autonomous Driving: Common Practices and Emerging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05113/) (2019)
- [Calibrating Deep Neural Networks using Focal Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09437/) (2020)
- [Verified Uncertainty Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10155/) (2019)
- [On Mixup Training: Improved Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11001/) (2019)
- [Evaluating model calibration in classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06977/) (2019)
- [CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Natural Disasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00713/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Training for Whole Image Breast Cancer Diagnosis using An All Convolutional Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05775/) (2017)
- [Calibration tests in multi-class classification: A unifying framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11385/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Image Classification using Entailment Cone Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03459/) (2020)
- [COVID-Net CXR-2: An Enhanced Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06640/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey on the Honesty of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18786/) (2024)
- [Calibration Is Not Enough: Evaluating Confidence Estimation Under Language Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08064/) (2026)
- [A Decision-driven Methodology for Designing Uncertainty-aware AI Self-Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01301/) (2024)
- [A Guide to Failure in Machine Learning: Reliability and Robustness from Foundations to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00563/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classifier calibration has received recent attention from the machine learning community due both to its practical utility in facilitating decision making, as well as the observation that modern neural network classifiers are poorly calibrated. Much of this focus has been towards the goal of learning classifiers such that their output with largest magnitude (the "predicted class") is calibrated. However, this narrow interpretation of classifier outputs does not adequately capture the variety of practical use cases in which classifiers can aid in decision making. In this work, we argue that more expressive metrics must be developed that accurately measure calibration error for the specific context in which a classifier will be deployed. To this end, we derive a number of different metrics using a generalization of Expected Calibration Error (ECE) that measure calibration error under different definitions of reliability. We then provide an extensive empirical evaluation of commonly used neural network architectures and calibration techniques with respect to these metrics. We find that: 1) definitions of ECE that focus solely on the predicted class fail to accurately measure calibration error under a selection of practically useful definitions of reliability and 2) many common calibration techniques fail to improve calibration performance uniformly across ECE metrics derived from these diverse definitions of reliability.