Text categorization by fuzzy domain adaptation

Machine learning methods have attracted attention of researches in computational fields such as classification/categorization. However, these learning methods work under the assumption that the training and test data distributions are identical. In some real world applications, the training data (from the source domain) and test data (from the target domain) come from different domains and this may result in different data distributions. Moreover, the values of the features and/or labels of the data sets could be non-numeric and contain vague values. In this study, we propose a fuzzy domain adaptation method, which offers an effective way to deal with both issues. It utilizes the similarity concept to modify the target instances' labels, which were initially classified by a shift-unaware classifier. The proposed method is built on the given data and refines the labels. In this way it performs completely independently of the shift-unaware classifier. As an example of text categorization, 20Newsgroup data set is used in the experiments to validate the proposed method. The results, which are compared with those generated when using different baselines, demonstrate a significant improvement in the accuracy.