Cotransfer Learning Using Coupled Markov Chains with Restart

This article studies co-transfer learning, a machine learning strategy that uses labeled data to enhance the classification of different learning spaces simultaneously. The authors model the problem as a coupled Markov chain with restart. The transition probabilities in the coupled Markov chain can be constructed using the intra-relationships based on the affinity metric among instances in the same space, and the interrelationships based on co-occurrence information among instances from different spaces. The learning algorithm computes ranking of labels to indicate the importance of a set of labels to an instance by propagating the ranking score of labeled instances via the coupled Markov chain with restart. Experimental results on benchmark data (multiclass image-text and English-Spanish-French classification datasets) have shown that the learning algorithm is computationally efficient, and effective in learning across different spaces.