Multisource Heterogeneous Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Fuzzy Relation Neural Networks

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a classifier for a target domain is trained with labeled source data and unlabeled target data. Existing UDA methods assume that the source data come from the same source domain (i.e., single-source scenario) or from multiple source domains, whose feature spaces have the same dimension ( homogeneous ) but different distributions (i.e., multihomogeneous-source scenario). However, in the real world, for a specific target domain, we probably have multiple different-dimension ( heterogeneous ) source domains, which do not satisfy the assumption of existing UDA methods. To remove this assumption and move forward to a realistic UDA problem, this article presents a shared-fuzzy-equivalence-relation neural network (SFERNN) for addressing the multisource heterogeneous UDA problem. The SFERNN is a five-layer neural network containing <tex-math notation="LaTeX">c</tex-math> source branches and one target branch. The network structure of the SFERNN is first confirmed by a novel fuzzy relation called multisource shared fuzzy equivalence relation. Then, we optimize parameters of the SFERNN via minimizing cross-entropy loss on <tex-math notation="LaTeX">c</tex-math> source branches and the distributional discrepancy between each source branch and the target branch. Experiments distributed across eight real-world datasets are conducted to validate the SFERNN. This testing regime demonstrates that the SFERNN outperforms the existing single-source heterogeneous UDA methods, especially when the target domain contains few data.