A Non-parametric Conformity-Based Test for Transfer Decisions

This paper proposes a new non-parametric test to decide whether to transfer from source data to target data in order to improve the performance of predictive models on target domains. The test is based on the conformity framework. It statistically tests whether the target data and source data have been generated from the target distribution under the exchangeability assumption. The source data is transferred if and only if the test is positive. The experiments show that the test is better at deciding on instance transfer than existing methods.

[1]  Vladimir Vovk,et al.  A tutorial on conformal prediction , 2007, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[2]  D. Massart,et al.  The Mahalanobis distance , 2000 .

[3]  Philip S. Yu,et al.  Adaptation Regularization: A General Framework for Transfer Learning , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[4]  Marie Schmidt,et al.  Nonparametrics Statistical Methods Based On Ranks , 2016 .

[5]  Shai Ben-David,et al.  Detecting Change in Data Streams , 2004, VLDB.

[6]  Qiang Yang,et al.  Cross Validation Framework to Choose amongst Models and Datasets for Transfer Learning , 2010, ECML/PKDD.

[7]  Qiang Yang,et al.  A Survey on Transfer Learning , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[8]  Shotaro Akaho,et al.  TrBagg: A Simple Transfer Learning Method and its Application to Personalization in Collaborative Tagging , 2009, 2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.

[9]  W. Gasarch,et al.  The Book Review Column 1 Coverage Untyped Systems Simple Types Recursive Types Higher-order Systems General Impression 3 Organization, and Contents of the Book , 2022 .

[10]  Per Martin-Löf,et al.  The Definition of Random Sequences , 1966, Inf. Control..

[11]  Huaiyu Zhu On Information and Sufficiency , 1997 .

[12]  Yishay Mansour,et al.  Domain Adaptation: Learning Bounds and Algorithms , 2009, COLT.

[13]  Qiang Yang,et al.  Boosting for transfer learning , 2007, ICML '07.

[14]  Achim Rettinger,et al.  Boosting Expert Ensembles for Rapid Concept Recall , 2006, AAAI.

[15]  F. Wilcoxon Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods , 1945 .

[16]  Vladimir Vovk The Basic Conformal Prediction Framework , 2014 .

[17]  Chandan K. Reddy,et al.  Adaptive Boosting for Transfer Learning Using Dynamic Updates , 2011, ECML/PKDD.

[18]  Qiang Yang,et al.  Transitive Transfer Learning , 2015, KDD.

[19]  Vladimir Vovk,et al.  Conformal Prediction for Reliable Machine Learning: Theory, Adaptations and Applications , 2014 .

[20]  A. Church On the concept of a random sequence , 1940 .

[21]  D. Aldous Exchangeability and related topics , 1985 .