Multi-Task Feature Interaction Learning

Kaixiang Lin, Jianpeng Xu, Inci M. Baytas, Shuiwang Ji, Jiayu Zhou

Abstract: One major limitation of linear models is the lack of capability to capture predictive information from interactions between features. While introducing high-order feature interaction terms can overcome this limitation, this approach tremendously increases the model complexity and imposes significant challenges in the learning against overfitting. In this paper, we proposed a novel Multi-Task feature Interaction Learning~(MTIL) framework to exploit the task relatedness from high-order feature interactions, which provides better generalization performance by inductive transfer among tasks via shared representations of feature interactions. We formulate two concrete approaches under this framework and provide efficient algorithms: the shared interaction approach and the embedded interaction approach. The former assumes tasks share the same set of interactions, and the latter assumes feature interactions from multiple tasks come from a shared subspace. We have provided efficient algorithms for solving the two approaches. Extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework.