Online transfer learning with partial feedback

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Online learning for multi-class classification is a well-studied topic in machine learning. The standard multi-class classification online learning setting assumes continuous availability of the ground-truth class labels. However, in many real-life applications, only partial feedback of the predicted label can be obtained and only the correctness of the prediction is available. Hence, knowledge of the correct label is missing in the case of erroneous predictions. In this case, learning may be slower and classifiers less accurate than in the full feedback scenario. Although several online learning algorithms with partial feedback have been proposed, real-world applications would still benefit from further performance improvement. In this paper, we exploit transfer learning to improve learning in the case of erroneous predictions. We propose the Partial Feedback Online Transfer Learning (PFOTL) algorithm, which uses learned knowledge from the source domain in addition to received partial feedback, and present analysis and a mistake bound for the algorithm. In our experimental results on four benchmark datasets, the proposed algorithm achieves higher online cumulative accuracy than the comparable state-of-the-art algorithms. Two potential applications of our work would be online recommender systems and privacy protection.

Original languageEnglish
Article number118738
JournalExpert Systems with Applications
Volume212
Number of pages13
ISSN0957-4174
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd

    Research areas

  • Multi-class classification, Online learning, Online transfer learning, Partial feedback, Transfer learning

ID: 389406925