Source-Target-Source Classification Using Stacked Denoising Autoencoders

Abstract

Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) emerged as a new paradigm in machine learning in which a deep model is trained on a source task and the knowledge acquired is then totally or partially transferred to help in solving a target task. Even though DTL offers a greater flexibility in extracting high-level features and enabling feature transference from a source to a target task, the DTL solution might get stuck at local minima leading to performance degradation-negative transference-, similar to what happens in the classical machine learning approach. In this paper, we propose the Source-Target-Source (STS) methodology to reduce the impact of negative transference, by iteratively switching between source and target tasks in the training process. The results show the effectiveness of such approach.