Statistical Perspectives on Reliability of Artificial Intelligence Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become increasingly popular in many areas. Nevertheless, AI technologies are still in their developing stages, and many issues need to be addressed. Among those, the reliability of AI systems needs to be demonstrated so that the AI systems can be used with confidence by the general public. In this paper, we provide statistical perspectives on the reliability of AI systems. Different from other considerations, the reliability of AI systems focuses on the time dimension. That is, the system can perform its designed functionality for the intended period. We introduce a so-called SMART statistical framework for AI reliability research, which includes five components: Structure of the system, Metrics of reliability, Analysis of failure causes, Reliability assessment, and Test planning. We review traditional methods in reliability data analysis and software reliability, and discuss how those existing methods can be transformed for reliability modeling and assessment of AI systems. We also describe recent developments in modeling and analysis of AI reliability and outline statistical research challenges in this area, including out-of-distribution detection, the effect of the training set, adversarial attacks, model accuracy, and uncertainty quantification, and discuss how those topics can be related to AI reliability, with illustrative examples. Finally, we discuss data collection and test planning for AI reliability assessment and how to improve system designs for higher AI reliability. The paper closes with some concluding remarks.