Machine learning

Mathematical analysis

Data science

Inductive transfer

Robot

Artificial intelligence

Combinatorics

Homogeneous

Mobile robot

Mathematics

Domain (mathematical analysis)

Knowledge management

Robot learning

Transfer of training

Computer science

Active learning (machine learning)

Transfer of learning

Proceedings of the IEEE

Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target-domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. Due to the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning research studies, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of transfer learning in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Unlike previous surveys, this survey article reviews more than 40 representative transfer learning approaches, especially homogeneous transfer learning approaches, from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, over 20 representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different data sets, that is, Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31, and the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.

A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning