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Another Fit Bites the Dust: Conformal Prediction as a Calibration Standard for Machine Learning in High-Energy Physics

Machine-learning techniques are essential in modern collider research, yet their probabilistic outputs often lack calibrated uncertainty estimates and finite-sample guarantees, limiting their direct use in statistical inference and decision-making. Conformal prediction (CP) provides a simple, distribution-free framework for calibrating arbitrary predictive models without retraining, yielding rigorous uncertainty quantification with finite-sample coverage guarantees under minimal exchangeability assumptions, without reliance on asymptotics, limit theorems, or Gaussian approximations. In this work, we investigate CP as a unifying calibration layer for machine-learning applications in high-energy physics. Using publicly available collider datasets and a diverse set of models, we show that a single conformal formalism can be applied across regression, binary and multi-class classification, anomaly detection, and generative modelling, converting raw model outputs into statistically valid prediction sets, typicality regions, and p-values with controlled false-positive rates. While conformal prediction does not improve raw model performance, it enforces honest uncertainty quantification and transparent error control. We argue that conformal calibration should be adopted as a standard component of machine-learning pipelines in collider physics, enabling reliable interpretation, robust comparisons, and principled statistical decisions in experimental and phenomenological analyses.

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