A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews recent transfer learning research, connecting various approaches and summarizing mechanisms, while also experimentally comparing over twenty models across multiple datasets to highlight practical application considerations.

Contribution

It systematically connects and interprets recent transfer learning approaches, especially homogeneous methods, and provides experimental comparisons to guide practical model selection.

Findings

Transfer learning reduces dependence on target domain data.

Different models perform variably across datasets.

Model selection is crucial for practical applications.

Abstract

Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. Due to the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of transfer learning in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Unlike previous surveys, this survey paper reviews more than forty representative transfer learning approaches, especially homogeneous transfer learning approaches, from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, over twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.