1 research outputs found
Transfer Learning Using Feature Selection
We present three related ways of using Transfer Learning to improve feature
selection. The three methods address different problems, and hence share
different kinds of information between tasks or feature classes, but all three
are based on the information theoretic Minimum Description Length (MDL)
principle and share the same underlying Bayesian interpretation. The first
method, MIC, applies when predictive models are to be built simultaneously for
multiple tasks (``simultaneous transfer'') that share the same set of features.
MIC allows each feature to be added to none, some, or all of the task models
and is most beneficial for selecting a small set of predictive features from a
large pool of features, as is common in genomic and biological datasets. Our
second method, TPC (Three Part Coding), uses a similar methodology for the case
when the features can be divided into feature classes. Our third method,
Transfer-TPC, addresses the ``sequential transfer'' problem in which the task
to which we want to transfer knowledge may not be known in advance and may have
different amounts of data than the other tasks. Transfer-TPC is most beneficial
when we want to transfer knowledge between tasks which have unequal amounts of
labeled data, for example the data for disambiguating the senses of different
verbs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches with experimental
results on real world data pertaining to genomics and to Word Sense
Disambiguation (WSD).Comment: Masters' Thesi