Semi-Generative Modelling: Covariate-Shift Adaptation with Cause and Effect Features
Julius Kügelgen, Alexander Mey, Marco Loog
Abstract
Current methods for covariate-shift adaptation use unlabelled data to compute importance weights or domain-invariant features, while the final model is trained on labelled data only. Here, we consider a particular case of covariate shift which allows us also to learn from unlabelled data, that is, combining adaptation and semi-supervised learning. Using ideas from causality, we argue that this requires learning with both causes, $X_C$, and effects, $X_E$, of a target variable, $Y$, and show how this setting leads to what we call a semi-generative model, $P(Y,X_E|X_C,\theta)$. Our approach is robust to domain shifts in the distribution of causal features and leverages unlabelled data by learning a direct map from causes to effects. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate significant improvements in classification over purely-supervised and importance-weighting baselines.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v89-kugelgen19a,
title = {Semi-Generative Modelling: Covariate-Shift Adaptation with Cause and Effect Features},
author = {von K\"{u}gelgen, Julius and Mey, Alexander and Loog, Marco},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
pages = {1361--1369},
year = {2019},
editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Sugiyama, Masashi},
volume = {89},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {16--18 Apr},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/kugelgen19a/kugelgen19a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v89/kugelgen19a.html},
abstract = {Current methods for covariate-shift adaptation use unlabelled data to compute importance weights or domain-invariant features, while the final model is trained on labelled data only. Here, we consider a particular case of covariate shift which allows us also to learn from unlabelled data, that is, combining adaptation and semi-supervised learning. Using ideas from causality, we argue that this requires learning with both causes, $X_C$, and effects, $X_E$, of a target variable, $Y$, and show how this setting leads to what we call a semi-generative model, $P(Y,X_E|X_C,\theta)$. Our approach is robust to domain shifts in the distribution of causal features and leverages unlabelled data by learning a direct map from causes to effects. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate significant improvements in classification over purely-supervised and importance-weighting baselines.}
}