  This paper identifies a problem with the usual procedure for
L2-regularization parameter estimation in a domain adaptation setting. In such
a setting, there are differences between the distributions generating the
training data (source domain) and the test data (target domain). The usual
cross-validation procedure requires validation data, which can not be obtained
from the unlabeled target data. The problem is that if one decides to use
source validation data, the regularization parameter is underestimated. One
possible solution is to scale the source validation data through importance
weighting, but we show that this correction is not sufficient. We conclude the
paper with an empirical analysis of the effect of several importance weight
estimators on the estimation of the regularization parameter.
