Supervised transfer sparse coding

A combination of the sparse coding and transfer learn- ing techniques was shown to be accurate and robust in classification tasks where training and testing objects have a shared feature space but are sampled from differ- ent underlying distributions, i.e., belong to different do- mains. The key assumption in such case is that in spite of the domain disparity, samples from different domains share some common hidden factors. Previous methods often assumed that all the objects in the target domain are unlabeled, and thus the training set solely comprised objects from the source domain. However, in real world applications, the target domain often has some labeled objects, or one can always manually label a small num- ber of them. In this paper, we explore such possibil- ity and show how a small number of labeled data in the target domain can significantly leverage classifica- tion accuracy of the state-of-the-art transfer sparse cod- ing methods. We further propose a unified framework named supervised transfer sparse coding (STSC) which simultaneously optimizes sparse representation, domain transfer and classification. Experimental results on three applications demonstrate that a little manual labeling and then learning the model in a supervised fashion can significantly improve classification accuracy.