Abstract. Methods for inductive transfer take advantage of knowledge from previous learning tasks to solve a newly given task. In the context of supervised learning, the task is to find a suitable bias for a new dataset, given a set of known datasets. In this paper, we take a kernelbased approach to inductive transfer, that is, we aim at finding a suitable kernel for the new data. In our setup, the kernel is taken from the linear span of a set of predefined kernels. To find such a kernel, we apply convex optimization on two levels. On the base level, we propose an iterative procedure to generate kernels that generalize well on the known datasets. On the meta level, we combine those kernels in a minimization criterion to predict a suitable kernel for the new data. The criterion is based on a meta kernel capturing the similarity of two datasets. In experiments on small molecule and text data, kernel-based inductive transfer showed a statistically significant improvement over the best individual kernel in almost all cases.
REF tried to find a kernel given a set of predefined kernels.
Kernel-based inductive transfer
in Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, European Conference, ECML/PKDD 2008, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Mathematics Computer Science