A robust one-class transfer learning method with uncertain data

One-class classification aims at constructing a distinctive classifier based on one class of examples. Most of the existing one-class classification methods are proposed based on the assumptions that: (1) there are a large number of training examples available for learning the classifier; (2) the training examples can be explicitly collected and hence do not contain any uncertain information. However, in real-world applications, these assumptions are not always satisfied. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called uncertain one-class transfer learning with support vector machine (UOCT-SVM), which is capable of constructing an accurate classifier on the target task by transferring knowledge from multiple source tasks whose data may contain uncertain information. In UOCT-SVM, the optimization function is formulated to deal with uncertain data and transfer learning based on one-class SVM. Then, an iterative framework is proposed to solve the optimization function. Extensive experiments have showed that UOCT-SVM can mitigate the effect of uncertain data on the decision boundary and transfer knowledge from source tasks to help build an accurate classifier on the target task, compared with state-of-the-art one-class classification methods.