Source Model Selection for Deep Learning in the Time Series Domain

Transfer Learning aims to transfer knowledge from a source task to a target task. We focus on a situation when there is a large number of available source models, and we are interested in choosing a single source model that can maximize the predictive performance in the target domain. Existing methods compute some form of “similarity” between the source task data and the target task data. They then select the most similar source task and use the model trained on it for transfer learning. Previous methods do not account for the fact that it is the model parameters that are transferred rather than the data. Therefore, the “similarity” of the source data does not directly influence transfer learning performance. In addition, we would like the possibility of confidently selecting a source model even when the data it was trained on is not available, for example, due to privacy or copyright constraints. We propose to use the truncated source models as encoders for the target data. We then select a source model based on how well it clusters the target data in the latent encoding space, which we calculate using the Mean Silhouette Coefficient. We prove that if the encodings achieve a Mean Silhouette Coefficient of 1, optimal classification can be achieved using just the final layer of the target network. We evaluate our method using the University of California, Riverside (UCR) time series archive and show that the proposed method achieves comparable results to previous work, without using the source data.