A distribution-free conformal prediction certification layer for safety-critical ordinal classification. Guarantees contiguous prediction sets, marginal/group-conditional validity, true-label coverage under banded reporting noise, and severity-weighted risk control (fatal-omission bounds) with an explicit additive slack budget.
Conformal prediction from scratch: the exact finite-sample coverage law, the 2012 deployment that broke it (Hurricane Sandy included), and the online repair
