TRACE-CRC: Trajectory-Adaptive Conformal Risk Control for Multi-Step Channel State Information Prediction

Abstract:Reliable prediction of time-varying channel state information (CSI) is essential for efficient wireless communication. Each CSI frame is a matrix-valued representation of the wireless channel response, and a sequence of CSI frames forms a temporal channel trajectory. Modern deep learning-based CSI predictors, however, often provide only point predictions and lack calibrated uncertainty estimates. This limitation is particularly problematic in multi-step CSI prediction, where the target is a sequence of future CSI matrices, and downstream decisions such as beamforming or scheduling may fail if any part of the predicted trajectory is unreliable. We propose trajectory-adaptive calibration and error profiling with conformal risk control (TRACE-CRC), a method for trajectory-aware uncertainty quantification in multi-step CSI prediction. TRACE-CRC constructs Frobenius-norm uncertainty balls around predicted CSI matrices and controls the risk that at least one future frame is uncovered. Instead of calibrating each future step independently, TRACE-CRC combines future-step-dependent error profiling, trajectory difficulty stratification, and learn-then-test (LTT) risk control. Empirically, TRACE-CRC achieves reliable trajectory-level coverage with substantially smaller uncertainty balls than conservative multi-step corrections, while avoiding the trajectory undercoverage of compact stepwise and adaptive conformal baselines.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2608.27124 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.27124v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27124 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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