Dataset Shift in Machine Learning

Dataset shift is a common problem in predictive modeling that occurs when the joint distribution of inputs and outputs differs between training and test stages. Covariate shift, a particular case of dataset shift, occurs when only the input distribution changes. Dataset shift is present in most practical applications, for reasons ranging from the bias introduced by experimental design to the irreproducibility of the testing conditions at training time. (An example is -email spam filtering, which may fail to recognize spam that differs in form from the spam the automatic filter has been built on.) Despite this, and despite the attention given to the apparently similar problems of semi-supervised learning and active learning, dataset shift has received relatively little attention in the machine learning community until recently. This volume offers an overview of current efforts to deal with dataset and covariate shift.

The chapters offer a mathematical and philosophical introduction to the problem, place dataset shift in relationship to transfer learning, transduction, local learning, active learning, and semi-supervised learning, provide theoretical views of dataset and covariate shift (including decision theoretic and Bayesian perspectives), and present algorithms for covariate shift.

Contributors: Shai Ben-David, Steffen Bickel, Karsten Borgwardt, Michael Bruckner, David Corfield, Amir Globerson, Arthur Gretton, Lars Kai Hansen, Matthias Hein, Jiayuan Huang, Takafumi Kanamori, Klaus-Robert Muller, Sam Roweis, Neil Rubens, Tobias Scheffer, Marcel Schmittfull, Bernhard Scholkopf, Hidetoshi Shimodaira, Alex Smola, Amos Storkey, Masashi Sugiyama, Choon Hui Teo

Neural Information Processing series

Joaquin Quinonero-Candela is a Researcher in the Online Services and Advertising Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K. Masashi Sugiyama is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Anton Schwaighofer is an Applied Researcherin the Online Services and Advertising Group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, U.K. Neil D. Lawrence is Senior Research Fellow and Member of the Machine Learning and Optimisation Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.