DAPDAG: Domain Adaptation via Perturbed DAG Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces DAPDAG, a domain adaptation framework that uses DAG reconstruction via an auto-encoder to improve prediction accuracy across different domains with varying distributions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel auto-encoder-based method that learns an invariant DAG structure for domain adaptation, enhancing predictive performance in target domains.

Findings

Reconstructing the DAG improves inference accuracy.

DAPDAG achieves competitive prediction results.

Method shows strong adaptation to significantly different target domains.

Abstract

Leveraging labelled data from multiple domains to enable prediction in another domain without labels is a significant, yet challenging problem. To address this problem, we introduce the framework DAPDAG (\textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation via \textbf{P}erturbed \textbf{DAG} Reconstruction) and propose to learn an auto-encoder that undertakes inference on population statistics given features and reconstructing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) as an auxiliary task. The underlying DAG structure is assumed invariant among observed variables whose conditional distributions are allowed to vary across domains led by a latent environmental variable $E$. The encoder is designed to serve as an inference device on $E$ while the decoder reconstructs each observed variable conditioned on its graphical parents in the DAG and the inferred $E$. We train the encoder and decoder jointly in an end-to-end manner and conduct experiments on synthetic and real datasets with mixed variables. Empirical results demonstrate that reconstructing the DAG benefits the approximate inference. Furthermore, our approach can achieve competitive performance against other benchmarks in prediction tasks, with better adaptation ability, especially in the target domain significantly different from the source domains.