Hypothesis transfer learning (HTL) contrasts domain adaptation by allowing
for a previous task leverage, named the source, into a new one, the target,
without requiring access to the source data. Indeed, HTL relies only on a
hypothesis learnt from such source data, relieving the hurdle of expansive data
storage and providing great practical benefits. Hence, HTL is highly beneficial
for real-world applications relying on big data. The analysis of such a method
from a theoretical perspective faces multiple challenges, particularly in
classification tasks. This paper deals with this problem by studying the
learning theory of HTL through algorithmic stability, an attractive theoretical
framework for machine learning algorithms analysis. In particular, we are
interested in the statistical behaviour of the regularized empirical risk
minimizers in the case of binary classification. Our stability analysis
provides learning guarantees under mild assumptions. Consequently, we derive
several complexity-free generalization bounds for essential statistical
quantities like the training error, the excess risk and cross-validation
estimates. These refined bounds allow understanding the benefits of transfer
learning and comparing the behaviour of standard losses in different scenarios,
leading to valuable insights for practitioners