What "Form'' of Uncertainty Does Conformal Prediction Quantify?

Conformal prediction (CP) is a widely used frequentist framework to quantify uncertainty by constructing prediction sets with user-specified marginal coverage guarantees. In practice, CP is typically applied on top of probabilistic classifiers, which are able to express aleatoric but not epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, we consider the question of how to optimally employ CP on top of a more expressive formalism, namely credal sets, which can express both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. More specifically, we propose probabilistic Bernoulli prediction sets (BPS) and derive a variant that achieves conditional coverage for valid credal sets while remaining minimal in expected size. We then address the more realistic scenario in which the validity of the credal sets is not guaranteed. Assuming access to calibration data with ground-truth distributions over labels, we apply conformal risk control to BPS and derive a PAC-style guarantee: with high probability over the data, the achieved conditional coverage is at least the desired level. We validate our theoretical findings empirically over various datasets.

Prediction-set size offers a coarse summary of conformal uncertainty. We develop a richer perspective through the geometry of credal sets: families of probability distributions compatible with conformal prediction (CP) regions. We establish this representation for split CP, extending a correspondence recently identified for full CP. Building on this representation, we derive analytical characterisations and exact algorithms for several widely used credal uncertainty measures, reducing potentially exponential computations to linear time after sorting the conformal p-values. We further unify several of these measures with classical conformal summaries by integrating set-size penalties based on Tsallis entropies across error levels. We also prove an impossibility theorem: for common split-conformal regression constructions, uncertainty summaries of the induced credal sets cannot distinguish between inputs. Classification experiments on selective prediction and distribution-shift detection show that these summaries often recover useful ranking information lost by prediction-set size at a fixed error level, enabling finer-grained uncertainty assessment. These results establish credal geometry as a principled framework for quantifying conformal uncertainty and understanding its limitations.

Conformal Prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage, but its reliance on a single global calibration threshold obscures the sources of uncertainty at the instance level. In particular, it conflates irreducible noise with uncertainty induced by heterogeneous training data (aleatoric), model limitations, or calibration mismatch (epistemic), offering little insight into why an interval is wide or whether it could be reduced. We introduce an uncertainty-aware explainability framework that analyses the reducibility of calibration-induced epistemic conformal uncertainty via progressive calibration localisation for regression tasks. The approach is diagnostic rather than causal: it does not estimate true aleatoric or epistemic uncertainty, but explains how conformal intervals contract and stabilise as calibration support is localised around a test instance. Across benchmarks and real-world data, absolute reducible uncertainty aligns with epistemic proxies, while its relative contribution varies by task, revealing regimes hidden by interval width. This instance-level view complements conformal uncertainty, enhancing interpretability without altering the predictor or coverage.