A New PAC-Bayesian Perspective on Domain Adaptation

We study the issue of PAC-Bayesian domain adaptation: We want to learn, from a source domain, a majority vote model dedicated to a target one. Our theoretical contribution brings a new perspective by deriving an upper-bound on the target risk where the distributions’ divergence - expressed as a ratio - controls the trade-off between a source error measure and the target voters’ disagreement. Our bound suggests that one has to focus on regions where the source data is informative. From this result, we derive a PAC-Bayesian generalization bound, and specialize it to linear classifiers. Then, we infer a learning algorithm and perform experiments on real data.