Transfer dimensionality reduction by Gaussian process in parallel

Dimensionality reduction has been considered as one of the most significant tools for data analysis. In general, supervised information is helpful for dimensionality reduction. However, in typical real applications, supervised information in multiple source tasks may be available, while the data of the target task are unlabeled. An interesting problem of how to guide the dimensionality reduction for the unlabeled target data by exploiting useful knowledge, such as label information, from multiple source tasks arises in such a scenario. In this paper, we propose a new method for dimensionality reduction in the transfer learning setting. Unlike traditional paradigms where the useful knowledge from multiple source tasks is transferred through distance metric, we attempt to learn a more informative mapping function between the original data and the reduced data by Gaussian process that behaves more appropriately than other parametric regression methods due to its less parametric characteristic. In our proposal, we firstly convert the dimensionality reduction problem into integral regression problems in parallel. Gaussian process is then employed to learn the underlying relationship between the original data and the reduced data. Such a relationship can be appropriately transferred to the target task by exploiting the prediction ability of the Gaussian process model and inventing different kinds of regularizers. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data sets show the effectiveness of our method.