In this paper we consider the binary transfer learning problem, focusing on
how to select and combine sources from a large pool to yield a good performance
on a target task. Constraining our scenario to real world, we do not assume the
direct access to the source data, but rather we employ the source hypotheses
trained from them. We propose an efficient algorithm that selects relevant
source hypotheses and feature dimensions simultaneously, building on the
literature on the best subset selection problem. Our algorithm achieves
state-of-the-art results on three computer vision datasets, substantially
outperforming both transfer learning and popular feature selection baselines in
a small-sample setting. We also present a randomized variant that achieves the
same results with the computational cost independent from the number of source
hypotheses and feature dimensions. Also, we theoretically prove that, under
reasonable assumptions on the source hypotheses, our algorithm can learn
effectively from few examples