Self-Adaptive Imbalanced Domain Adaptation With Deep Sparse Autoencoder

Domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge between different domains to develop an effective hypothesis in the target domain with scarce labeled data, which is an effective method for remedying the problem of labeled data requirement in deep learning. In reality, it is unavoidable that the dataset has a large gap in the number of positive and negative instances across different categories in source and target domains, which is the imbalanced domain adaptation problem. However, since the imbalanced degree always varies greatly in different source- and target-domain datasets, most of the existing imbalanced domain adaptation models fix the imbalanced parameters, which cannot adapt to the change of the proportion between positive and negative instances in different domains. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a self-adaptive imbalanced domain adaptation method via a deep sparse autoencoder, which can adjust the model automatically according to the imbalanced extent for bridging the chasm of domains. More specifically, the self-adaptive imbalanced cross-entropy loss is designed for emphasizing more on minority categories and compensating the bias of training loss automatically. In addition, to alleviate the deficient problem of labeled data, we further propose the unlabeled information incorporating method by minimizing the distribution discrepancy of high-level representation space between the source and target domains. Experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to other state-of-the-art methods. © 2020 IEEE.