Weighted Multisource Tradaboost
This is an incremental improvement for transfer learning practitioners, addressing source-target ratio weighing.
The paper tackles the problem of balancing target and source data in transfer learning by proposing Weighted Multisource Tradaboost, which outperforms the base method as target samples increase, though all transfer methods are eventually outperformed by a no-transfer SVM with large target samples.
In this paper we propose an improved method for transfer learning that takes into account the balance between target and source data. This method builds on the state-of-the-art Multisource Tradaboost, but weighs the importance of each datapoint taking into account the amount of target and source data available. A comparative study is then presented exposing the performance of four transfer learning methods as well as the proposed Weighted Multisource Tradaboost. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to outperform the base method as the number of target samples increase. These results are promising in the sense that source-target ratio weighing may be a path to improve current methods of transfer learning. However, against the asymptotic conjecture, all transfer learning methods tested in this work get outperformed by a no-transfer SVM for large number on target samples.