Research on transfer learning algorithm based on support vector machine

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Li, Jingmei | Wu, Weifei^{; *} | Xue, Di

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, P.R. China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Weifei Wu, E-mail: wuweifei@hrbeu.edu.cn.

Abstract:  Transfer learning is a new machine learning algorithm. It solves problems in different but related target domains by utilizing the knowledge in existing data. Based on the classical SVM algorithm and transfer learning, a selective transfer learning support vector machine (STL-SVM) algorithm is proposed in this paper. First, STL-SVM uses the maximum mean discrepancy to measure the weight vector of the source domain samples relative to the target domain, and selects samples from the source domain according to each weight to avoid negative transfer. Then, the knowledge in the source domain is learned by the approximate extreme point support vector at the minimum training data cost. Finally, the object function is constructed by the obtained knowledge and the soft-margin SVM. In the constraint conditions of the objective function, the learned knowledge that is highly correlated with the target domain is selected, and further, the phenomenon of negative transfer is avoided in principle. STL-SVM solves the problem of negative transfer, and has considerable advantages in training time efficiency compared with the existing algorithms. The experimental results on artificial and real datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Machine learning, support vector machine, transfer learning, classification

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-190055

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 4091-4106, 2020