Query by diverse committee in transfer active learning

Transfer active learning, which is an emerging learning paradigm, aims to actively select informative instances with the aid of transferred knowledge from related tasks. Recently, several studies have addressed this problem. However, how to handle the distributional differences between the source and target domains remains an open problem. In this paper, a novel transfer active learning algorithm is proposed, inspired by the classical query by committee algorithm. Diverse committee members from both domains are maintained to improve the classification accuracy and a mechanism is included to evaluate each member during the iterations. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that our algorithm performs better and is also more robust than the state-of-the-art methods.