Multi-source transfer learning has been proven effective when within-target labeled data is scarce. Previous work focuses primarily on exploiting domain similarities and assumes that source domains are richly or at least comparably labeled. While this strong assumption is never true in practice, this paper relaxes it and addresses challenges related to sources with diverse labeling volume and diverse reliability. The first challenge is combining domain similarity and source reliability by proposing a new transfer learning method that utilizes both source-target similarities and inter-source relationships. The second challenge involves pool-based active learning where the oracle is only available in source domains, resulting in an integrated active transfer learning framework that incorporates distribution matching and uncertainty sampling. Extensive experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods over several baselines including state-of-the-art transfer learning methods.
: Transfer learning aims at utilizing source domain knowledge to construct a model with low generalization error in the target domain. Transfer learning with multiple sources is challenging because of distribution discrepancies and complex inter-source dependencies. Most existing work focuses on how to capture the diverse domain similarities. Due to stability and capability of measuring fine-grained similarities explicitly, ensemble approaches are widely used. In @cite_25 , adaptive SVM (A-SVM) is proposed to adapt several trained source SVMs and learn model importance from meta-level features based on distributions. In contrast, @cite_23 used Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) @cite_17 as source weights, while adding an additional manifold regularization based on a smoothness assumption of the target classifier. A more sophisticated two-stage weighting methodology based on distribution matching and conditional probability differences is presented in @cite_7 . However, the valuable unlabeled data is not utilized in their method. Moreover, these methods assume that all sources are equally reliable and they have the limitation that inter-source relationships are ignored.
@cite_7 @cite_25 @cite_23 @cite_17
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Transfer learning has benefited many real-world applications where labeled data are abundant in source domains but scarce in the target domain. As there are usually multiple relevant domains where knowledge can be transferred, multiple source transfer learning MSTL has recently attracted much attention. However, we are facing two major challenges when applying MSTL. First, without knowledge about the difference between source and target domains, negative transfer occurs when knowledge is transferred from highly irrelevant sources. Second, existence of imbalanced distributions in classes, where examples in one class dominate, can lead to improper judgement on the source domains' relevance to the target task. Since existing MSTL methods are usually designed to transfer from relevant sources with balanced distributions, they will fail in applications where these two challenges persist. In this article, we propose a novel two-phase framework to effectively transfer knowledge from multiple sources even when there exists irrelevant sources and imbalanced class distributions. First, an effective supervised local weight scheme is proposed to assign a proper weight to each source domain's classifier based on its ability of predicting accurately on each local region of the target domain. The second phase then learns a classifier for the target domain by solving an optimization problem which concerns both training error minimization and consistency with weighted predictions gained from source domains. A theoretical analysis shows that as the number of source domains increases, the probability that the proposed approach has an error greater than a bound is becoming exponentially small. We further extend the proposed approach to an online processing scenario to conduct transfer learning on continuously arriving data. Extensive experiments on disease prediction, spam filtering and intrusion detection datasets demonstrate that: i the proposed two-phase approach outperforms existing MSTL approaches due to its ability of tackling negative transfer and imbalanced distribution challenges, and ii the proposed online approach achieves comparable performance to the offline scheme. In this paper, we propose a new framework called domain adaptation machine (DAM) for the multiple source domain adaption problem. Under this framework, we learn a robust decision function (referred to as target classifier) for label prediction of instances from the target domain by leveraging a set of base classifiers which are prelearned by using labeled instances either from the source domains or from the source domains and the target domain. With the base classifiers, we propose a new domain-dependent regularizer based on smoothness assumption, which enforces that the target classifier shares similar decision values with the relevant base classifiers on the unlabeled instances from the target domain. This newly proposed regularizer can be readily incorporated into many kernel methods (e.g., support vector machines (SVM), support vector regression, and least-squares SVM (LS-SVM)). For domain adaptation, we also develop two new domain adaptation methods referred to as FastDAM and UniverDAM. In FastDAM, we introduce our proposed domain-dependent regularizer into LS-SVM as well as employ a sparsity regularizer to learn a sparse target classifier with the support vectors only from the target domain, which thus makes the label prediction on any test instance very fast. In UniverDAM, we additionally make use of the instances from the source domains as Universum to further enhance the generalization ability of the target classifier. We evaluate our two methods on the challenging TRECIVD 2005 dataset for the large-scale video concept detection task as well as on the 20 newsgroups and email spam datasets for document retrieval. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FastDAM and UniverDAM outperform the existing multiple source domain adaptation methods for the two applications. Domain transfer learning, which learns a target classifier using labeled data from a different distribution, has shown promising value in knowledge discovery yet still been a challenging problem. Most previous works designed adaptive classifiers by exploring two learning strategies independently: distribution adaptation and label propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning framework, referred to as Adaptation Regularization based Transfer Learning (ARTL), to model them in a unified way based on the structural risk minimization principle and the regularization theory. Specifically, ARTL learns the adaptive classifier by simultaneously optimizing the structural risk functional, the joint distribution matching between domains, and the manifold consistency underlying marginal distribution. Based on the framework, we propose two novel methods using Regularized Least Squares (RLS) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), respectively, and use the Representer theorem in reproducing kernel Hilbert space to derive corresponding solutions. Comprehensive experiments verify that ARTL can significantly outperform state-of-the-art learning methods on several public text and image datasets. Multi-source transfer learning has been proven effective when within-target labeled data is scarce. Previous work focuses primarily on exploiting domain similarities and assumes that source domains are richly or at least comparably labeled. While this strong assumption is never true in practice, this paper relaxes it and addresses challenges related to sources with diverse labeling volume and diverse reliability. The first challenge is combining domain similarity and source reliability by proposing a new transfer learning method that utilizes both source-target similarities and inter-source relationships. The second challenge involves pool-based active learning where the oracle is only available in source domains, resulting in an integrated active transfer learning framework that incorporates distribution matching and uncertainty sampling. Extensive experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods over several baselines including state-of-the-art transfer learning methods. Code related to this paper is available at: https: github.com iedwardwangi ReliableMSTL.