OTL: Online Transfer Learning
Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jialei Wang, Bin Li

Abstract

This paper investigates a new machine learning framework of Online Transfer Learning (OTL), which aims to attack an online learning task on a target domain by transferring knowledge from some source domain. We do not assume data in the target domain follows the same distribution as that in the source domain, and the motivation of our work is to enhance a supervised online learning task on a target domain by exploiting the existing knowledge that had been learnt from training data in source domains. OTL is in general a challenging problem since data in both source and target domains not only can be different in their class distributions, but also can be different in their feature representations. As a first attempt to this new research, we investigate two different settings of OTL: (i) OTL on homogeneous domains of common feature space, and (ii) OTL across heterogeneous domains of different feature spaces. For each setting, we propose OTL algorithms to solve two tasks: classification and regression, and show the theoretical bounds of the proposed algorithms. In addition, we also apply the OTL technique to solve the concept-drifting data stream learning problem, a real-life challenge in data mining and machine learning. Finally, we conduct extensive empirical studies on a comprehensive testbed, in which encouraging results validate the efficacy of our techniques.

The Online Transfer Learning framework

Publications

  • "Online Transfer Learning", Peilin Zhao, Steven C.H. Hoi, Jialei Wang, and Bin Li. Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), vol. 216, November 2014. pp. 76-102. [ PDF ]
  • "OTL: A Framework of Online Transfer Learning," Peilin Zhao and Steven C. H. Hoi, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Haifa, Israel, June 21-24, 2010 [ PDF]

  @Article{ Zhao/Hoi/Wang/Li/AIJ14,
  author   = { Peilin Zhao and Steven C.H. Hoi and Jialei Wang and Bin Li },
  title       = { Online Transfer Learning },
  journal  = { Artificial Intelligence },
  volume = {216},
  pages   = {76--102},
  year     = {2014},
  }

@Inproceedings{Zhao/Hoi/icml10,
  author   = {Peilin Zhao and Steven C.H. Hoi},
  title   = {OTL: A Framework of Online Transfer Learning},
  journal  = {ICML},
  year   = {2010},
  }

 

Source Code of OTL

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MATLAB Source Code for OTL: >>
Click here to download code  <<

Note: The code was implemented by Mr. Peilin Zhao. Feel free to send us your comments and suggestion.
 

Instructions for the OTL Code and Data


You can start by the following running example: 

MATLAB command >> Experiment_OTL_K_M('books_dvd')

The detailed instructions for the source code and data usages can be found here: instructions for OTL package.
 

Datasets in Our Experiments


Datasets used in the OTL paper: >> Click here to download datasets << 

 

Links to Resources

 

 

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