Rethinking Epistemic Uncertainty in Node Classification through Information Growth

Abstract:Epistemic uncertainty should decrease as additional information about the data-generating process (DGP) becomes available to the predictor. Yet, existing graph evidential deep learning (EDL) methods for node classification typically construct epistemic uncertainty from graph-specific properties and evaluate it on downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution detection, which do not test its reducibility as information about the DGP increases. To make reducibility directly testable, we introduce a statistical framework for studying epistemic uncertainty under information growth. Our framework specifies an information-growth experimental protocol and a consistency criterion for epistemic predictors, while using projective graph DGPs to ensure that growing graphs, which in general need not provide increasing information about the same DGP, constitute coherent observations of the same underlying process. We show that EDL methods do not explicitly estimate data uncertainty arising from a single finite graph observation and instead regulate epistemic uncertainty through model hyperparameters, precluding consistency, as corroborated by controlled information-growth experiments. As an alternative, we propose graph bootstrap ensembles, capturing both data and procedural uncertainty through graph resampling and randomized training. Under the same experimental protocol, these ensembles exhibit epistemic uncertainty reduction beyond standard deep ensembles. These findings support bootstrap ensembles as candidate consistent epistemic predictors under information growth.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.03418 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.03418v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.03418 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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