Boosting for transfer learning

Traditional machine learning makes a basic assumption: the training and test data should be under the same distribution. However, in many cases, this identicaldistribution assumption does not hold. The assumption might be violated when a task from one new domain comes, while there are only labeled data from a similar old domain. Labeling the new data can be costly and it would also be a waste to throw away all the old data. In this paper, we present a novel transfer learning framework called TrAdaBoost, which extends boosting-based learning algorithms (Freund & Schapire, 1997). TrAdaBoost allows users to utilize a small amount of newly labeled data to leverage the old data to construct a high-quality classification model for the new data. We show that this method can allow us to learn an accurate model using only a tiny amount of new data and a large amount of old data, even when the new data are not sufficient to train a model alone. We show that TrAdaBoost allows knowledge to be...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICML
• Authors: Wenyuan Dai, Qiang Yang, Gui-Rong Xue, Yong Yu
• Keywords: ICML 2007, Machine Learning, Old Data, Similar Old Domain, Test Data