  Domain adaptation is the supervised learning setting in which the training
and test data are sampled from different distributions: training data is
sampled from a source domain, whilst test data is sampled from a target domain.
This paper proposes and studies an approach, called feature-level domain
adaptation (FLDA), that models the dependence between the two domains by means
of a feature-level transfer model that is trained to describe the transfer from
source to target domain. Subsequently, we train a domain-adapted classifier by
minimizing the expected loss under the resulting transfer model. For linear
classifiers and a large family of loss functions and transfer models, this
expected loss can be computed or approximated analytically, and minimized
efficiently. Our empirical evaluation of FLDA focuses on problems comprising
binary and count data in which the transfer can be naturally modeled via a
dropout distribution, which allows the classifier to adapt to differences in
the marginal probability of features in the source and the target domain. Our
experiments on several real-world problems show that FLDA performs on par with
state-of-the-art domain-adaptation techniques.
