{"entity":{"id":"uncertainty-quantification","kind":"term","name":"Uncertainty quantification and confidence gates","aka":["uncertainty quantification","UQ","predictive uncertainty","prediction uncertainty","confidence gate","confidence gates","high, low or refused","abstention","selective prediction"],"tldr":"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.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_quantification","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_quantification"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["ood-detection","conformal-prediction","bootstrap","calibration"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"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."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"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"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/uncertainty-quantification/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"bootstrap","kind":"term","name":"Bootstrap resampling","route":"/terms/bootstrap/"},{"id":"calibration","kind":"term","name":"Calibration: reliability diagrams and the Brier score","route":"/terms/calibration/"},{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"conformal-prediction","kind":"term","name":"Conformal prediction","route":"/terms/conformal-prediction/"},{"id":"local-llm-reasoning-layer","kind":"term","name":"Local-only language models over patient data (privacy by architecture)","route":"/terms/local-llm-reasoning-layer/"},{"id":"ood-detection","kind":"term","name":"Out-of-distribution detection (Mahalanobis guard)","route":"/terms/ood-detection/"}]}}