The Most Related Knowledge First: A Progressive Domain Adaptation Method

Yunyun Wang, Dan Zhao, Yun Li, Ke-Jia Chen, Hui Xue

Abstract: In domain adaptation, how to select and transfer related knowledge is critical for learning. Inspired by the fact that human usually transfer from the more related experience to the less related one, in this paper, we propose a novel progressive domain adaptation (PDA) model, which attempts to transfer source knowledge by considering the transfer order based on relevance. Specifically, PDA transfers source instances iteratively from the most related ones to the least related ones, until all related source instances have been adopted. It is an iterative learning process, source instances adopted in each iteration are determined by a gradually annealed weight such that the later iteration will introduce more source instances. Further, a reverse classification performance is used to set the termination of iteration. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the competiveness of PDA compared with the state-of-arts.