Closed-Loop Uncertainty: The Evaluation and Calibration of Uncertainty for Human–Machine Teams under Data Drift

Though an accurate measurement of entropy, or more generally uncertainty, is critical to the success of human–machine teams, the evaluation of the accuracy of such metrics as a probability of machine correctness is often aggregated and not assessed as an iterative control process. The entropy of the decisions made by human–machine teams may not be accurately measured under cold start or at times of data drift unless disagreements between the human and machine are immediately fed back to the classifier iteratively. In this study, we present a stochastic framework by which an uncertainty model may be evaluated iteratively as a probability of machine correctness. We target a novel problem, referred to as the threshold selection problem, which involves a user subjectively selecting the point at which a signal transitions to a low state. This problem is designed to be simple and replicable for human–machine experimentation while exhibiting properties of more complex applications. Finally, we explore the potential of incorporating feedback of machine correctness into a baseline naïve Bayes uncertainty model with a novel reinforcement learning approach. The approach refines a baseline uncertainty model by incorporating machine correctness at every iteration. Experiments are conducted over a large number of realizations to properly evaluate uncertainty at each iteration of the human–machine team. Results show that our novel approach, called closed-loop uncertainty, outperforms the baseline in every case, yielding about 45% improvement on average.