Transfer learning with graph co-regularization

Transfer learning proves to be effective for leveraging labeled data in the source domain to build an accurate classifier in the target domain. The basic assumption behind transfer learning is that the involved domains share some common latent factors. Previous methods usually explore these latent factors by optimizing two separate objective functions, i.e., either maximizing the empirical likelihood, or preserving the geometric structure. Actually, these two objective functions are complementary to each other and optimizing them simultaneously can make the solution smoother and further improve the accuracy of the final model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Graph co-regularized Transfer Learning (GTL) for this purpose, which integrates the two objective functions seamlessly into one unified optimization problem. Thereafter, we present an iterative algorithm for the optimization problem with rigorous analysis on convergence and complexity. Our empirical study on two open data sets validates that GTL can consistently improve the classification accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art transfer learning methods.