We propose novel model transfer-learning methods that refine a decision forest model @math learned within a “source” domain using a training set sampled from a “target” domain, assumed to be a variation of the source. We present two random forest transfer algorithms. The first algorithm searches greedily for locally optimal modifications of each tree structure by trying to locally expand or reduce the tree around individual nodes. The second algorithm does not modify structure, but only the parameter (thresholds) associated with decision nodes. We also propose to combine both methods by considering an ensemble that contains the union of the two forests. The proposed methods exhibit impressive experimental results over a range of problems.
Most early transfer learning methods were based on neural networks, and while SVMs and ensemble techniques have become prominent in this field, DT models are still under-explored in this setting. Of the few tree-based techniques researched, only the work by operates in our model transfer setting. Specifically, proposed a simple technique to update an existing tree trained only on source samples using target samples @cite_31 . Their approach resembled a batch iterative learning technique which relies solely on iterative expansion steps. This technique does not consider any refitting of numeric feature thresholds.
@cite_31
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Cross-domain learning methods have shown promising results by leveraging labeled patterns from auxiliary domains to learn a robust classifier for target domain, which has a limited number of labeled samples. To cope with the tremendous change of feature distribution between different domains in video concept detection, we propose a new cross-domain kernel learning method. Our method, referred to as Domain Transfer SVM (DTSVM), simultaneously learns a kernel function and a robust SVM classifier by minimizing both the structural risk functional of SVM and the distribution mismatch of labeled and unlabeled samples between the auxiliary and target domains. Comprehensive experiments on the challenging TRECVID corpus demonstrate that DTSVM outperforms existing cross-domain learning and multiple kernel learning methods. Due to the limited amount of training samples, finetuning pre-trained deep models online is prone to overfitting. In this paper, we propose a sequential training method for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to effectively transfer pre-trained deep features for online applications. We regard a CNN as an ensemble with each channel of the output feature map as an individual base learner. Each base learner is trained using different loss criterions to reduce correlation and avoid over-training. To achieve the best ensemble online, all the base learners are sequentially sampled into the ensemble via important sampling. To further improve the robustness of each base learner, we propose to train the convolutional layers with random binary masks, which serves as a regularization to enforce each base learner to focus on different input features. The proposed online training method is applied to visual tracking problem by transferring deep features trained on massive annotated visual data and is shown to significantly improve tracking performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging benchmark data set and demonstrate that our tracking algorithm can outperform state-of-the-art methods with a considerable margin. Transfer learning for deep neural networks is the process of first training a base network on a source dataset, and then transferring the learned features (the network’s weights) to a second network to be trained on a target dataset. This idea has been shown to improve deep neural network’s generalization capabilities in many computer vision tasks such as image recognition and object localization. Apart from these applications, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have also recently gained popularity in the Time Series Classification (TSC) community. However, unlike for image recognition problems, transfer learning techniques have not yet been investigated thoroughly for the TSC task. This is surprising as the accuracy of deep learning models for TSC could potentially be improved if the model is fine-tuned from a pre-trained neural network instead of training it from scratch. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating how to transfer deep CNNs for the TSC task. To evaluate the potential of transfer learning, we performed extensive experiments using the UCR archive which is the largest publicly available TSC benchmark containing 85 datasets. For each dataset in the archive, we pre-trained a model and then fine-tuned it on the other datasets resulting in 7140 different deep neural networks. These experiments revealed that transfer learning can improve or degrade the models predictions depending on the dataset used for transfer. Therefore, in an effort to predict the best source dataset for a given target dataset, we propose a new method relying on Dynamic Time Warping to measure inter-datasets similarities. We describe how our method can guide the transfer to choose the best source dataset leading to an improvement in accuracy on 71 out of 85 datasets. Subspace learning and reconstruction have been widely explored in recent transfer learning work and generally a specially designed projection and reconstruction transfer matrix are wanted. However, existing subspace reconstruction based algorithms neglect the class prior such that the learned transfer function is biased, especially when data scarcity of some class is encountered. Different from those previous methods, in this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction-based transfer learning method called Class-specific Reconstruction Transfer Learning (CRTL), which optimizes a well-designed transfer loss function without class bias. Using a class-specific reconstruction matrix to align the source domain with the target domain which provides help for classification with class prior modeling. Furthermore, to keep the intrinsic relationship between data and labels after feature augmentation, a projected Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (pHSIC), that measures the dependency between two sets, is first proposed by mapping the data from original space to RKHS in transfer learning. In addition, combining low-rank and sparse constraints on the class-specific reconstruction coefficient matrix, the global and local data structures can be effectively preserved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional representation-based domain adaptation methods.