TrBagg: A Simple Transfer Learning Method and its Application to Personalization in Collaborative Tagging

The aim of transfer learning is to improve prediction accuracy on a target task by exploiting the training examples for tasks that are related to the target one. Transfer learning has received more attention in recent years, because this technique is considered to be helpful in reducing the cost of labeling. In this paper, we propose a very simple approach to transfer learning: TrBagg, which is the extension of bagging. TrBagg is composed of two stages: Many weak classifiers are first generated as in standard bagging, and these classifiers are then filtered based on their usefulness for the target task. This simplicity makes it easy to work reasonably well without severe tuning of learning parameters. Further, our algorithm equips an algorithmic scheme to avoid negative transfer. We applied TrBagg to personalized tag prediction tasks for social bookmarks. Our approach has several convenient characteristics for this task such as adaptation to multiple tasks with low computational cost.