Predictive Distribution Matching SVM for Multi-domain Learning

Domain adaptation (DA) using labeled data from related source domains comes in handy when the labeled patterns of a target domain are scarce. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that when the predictive distribution

P

(

y

|

x

) of the domains differs, which establishes

Negative Transfer

[19], DA approaches generally fail to perform well. Taking this cue, the Predictive Distribution Matching SVM (PDM-SVM) is proposed to learn a robust classifier in the target domain (referred to as the target classifier) by leveraging the labeled data from only the relevant regions of multiple sources. In particular, a

k

-nearest neighbor graph is iteratively constructed to identify the regions of relevant source labeled data where the predictive distribution maximally aligns with that of the target data. Predictive distribution matching regularization is then introduced to leverage these relevant source labeled data for training the target classifier. In addition, progressive transduction is adopted to infer the label of target unlabeled data for estimating the predictive distribution of the target domain. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the impact of Negative Transfer on several existing state-of-the-art DA methods, and demonstrate the improved performance efficacy of our proposed PDM-SVM on the commonly used multi-domain Sentiment and Reuters datasets.