[2604.02351] Modeling and Controlling Deployment Reliability under Temporal Distribution Shift

Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2604.02351 (cs) [Submitted on 1 Mar 2026] Title:Modeling and Controlling Deployment Reliability under Temporal Distribution Shift Authors:Naimur Rahman, Naazreen Tabassum View a PDF of the paper titled Modeling and Controlling Deployment Reliability under Temporal Distribution Shift, by Naimur Rahman and Naazreen Tabassum View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Machine learning models deployed in non-stationary environments are exposed to temporal distribution shift, which can erode predictive reliability over time. While common mitigation strategies such as periodic retraining and recalibration aim to preserve performance, they typically focus on average metrics evaluated at isolated time points and do not explicitly model how reliability evolves during deployment. We propose a deployment-centric framework that treats reliability as a dynamic state composed of discrimination and calibration. The trajectory of this state across sequential evaluation windows induces a measurable notion of volatility, allowing deployment adaptation to be formulated as a multi-objective control problem that balances reliability stability against cumulative intervention cost. Within this framework, we define a family of state-dependent intervention policies and empirically characterize the resulting cost-volatility Pareto frontier. Experiments on a large-scale, temporally indexed credit-risk dataset (1.35M loans, 2007-2018) show that selective, drift-tri...