Linear semi-supervised projection clustering by transferred centroid regularization

We propose a novel method, called Semi-supervised Projection Clustering in Transfer Learning (SPCTL), where multiple source domains and one target domain are assumed. Traditional semi-supervised projection clustering methods hold the assumption that the data and pairwise constraints are all drawn from the same domain. However, many related data sets with different distributions are available in real applications. The traditional methods thus can not be directly extended to such a scenario. One major challenging issue is how to exploit constraint knowledge from multiple source domains and transfer it to the target domain where all the data are unlabeled. To handle this difficulty, we are motivated to construct a common subspace where the difference in distributions among domains can be reduced. We also invent a transferred centroid regularization, which acts as a bridge to transfer the constraint knowledge to the target domain, to formulate this geometric structure formed by the centroids from different domains. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and benchmark data sets show the effectiveness of our method.