UQSay seminar #18: Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning

Due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications, many of which are coming with safety requirements, the notion of uncertainty has received increasing attention in machine learning research in the last couple of years. This talk will address the question of how to distinguish between two important types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic, in the setting of supervised learning, and how to quantify these uncertainties in terms of suitable numerical measures. Roughly speaking, while aleatoric uncertainty is due to inherent randomness, epistemic uncertainty is caused by a lack of knowledge. As a concrete approach for uncertainty quantification in machine learning, the use of ensemble learning methods will be discussed.