Transfer Learning: Survey and Classification

A key notion in numerous data mining and machine learning (ML) algorithms says that the training data and testing data are essentially in the similar feature space and also have the alike probability distribution function (PDF). Though, in several real-life applications, this theory might not retain true. There are issues where training data is costly or tough to gather. Thus, there is a necessity to build high-performance classifiers, trained using more commonly found data from distinct domains. This methodology is stated as transfer learning (TL). TL is usually beneficial when enough data is not available in the target domain but the large dataset is available in source domain. This survey paper explains transfer learning along with its categorization and provides examples and perspective related to transfer learning. Negative transfer learning is also discussed in detail along with its effects on the accomplishment of learning in target domain.