# Uncertainty quantification and confidence gates

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/uncertainty-quantification/  
OnCo record `uncertainty-quantification` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Uncertainty quantification attaches to each prediction an estimate of how much to trust it, so a system can report high confidence, low confidence or refuse.

## Summary

Uncertainty quantification is the quantitative characterisation and estimation of uncertainties in computational and real-world applications (Wikipedia). For a clinical prediction the sources are whether the input is in distribution, how stable the prediction is under bootstrap refits, and how strong the underlying signal is; a shape that reports the prediction together with these gates lets a downstream reader (a clinician, or another program) act only on the confident ones. Conformal prediction is the version with a statistical guarantee.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: uncertainty quantification; UQ; predictive uncertainty; prediction uncertainty; confidence gate; confidence gates; high, low or refused; abstention; selective prediction
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/uncertainty-quantification.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_quantification
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_quantification

## Connected records

- terms: [Bootstrap resampling](https://onco.cc/terms/bootstrap/), [Calibration: reliability diagrams and the Brier score](https://onco.cc/terms/calibration/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Conformal prediction](https://onco.cc/terms/conformal-prediction/), [Local-only language models over patient data (privacy by architecture)](https://onco.cc/terms/local-llm-reasoning-layer/), [Out-of-distribution detection (Mahalanobis guard)](https://onco.cc/terms/ood-detection/)

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