---
title: "Abstention band"
description: "A range of scores in which a system does not act on its own but routes the case to a human reviewer."
canonical: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/abstention-band
author: "Jorge García Aibar"
license: "CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)"
doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197
version: "0.5.0"
updated: 2026-09-24
---

# Abstention band

A range of scores in which a system does not act on its own but routes the case to a human reviewer. Its width is set by risk tier; the band size and the reviewers' override rate are monitored as signals. Conformal prediction gives one way to size it [1].

- Developed in: [ch. 11, Certainty required by risk tier](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined#certainty-required-by-risk-tier)
- Chapters: [ch. 11, AI Defined](https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/ai-defined)
- In the glossary chapter: https://aigovernanceengineer.com/bok/glossary#t-abstention-band

## Sources

[1] A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification (prediction sets with user-specified coverage; arXiv 2107.07511). Angelopoulos and Bates. 2021-07-15. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07511 (verified: primary)