A Semisupervised Classification Approach for Multidomain Networks with Domain Selection

Multidomain network classification has attracted significant attention in data integration and machine learning, which can enhance network classification or prediction performance by integrating information from different sources. Despite the previous success, existing multidomain network learning methods usually assume that different views are available for the same set of instances, and thus, they seek a consistent classification result for all domains. However, in many real-world problems, each domain has its specific instance set, and one instance in one domain may correspond to multiple instances in another domain. Moreover, due to the rapid growth of data sources, different domains may not be relevant to each other, which asks for selecting domains relevant to the target/focused domain. A key challenge under this setting is how to achieve accurate prediction by integrating different data representations without losing data information. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised classification approach for a multidomain network based on label propagation, i.e., multidomain classification with domain selection (MCS), which can deal with the cross-domain information and different instance sets in domains. In particular, with sparse weight properties, the proposed MCS can automatically identify those domains relevant to our target domain by assigning them higher weights than the other irrelevant domains. This not only significantly improves a classification accuracy but also helps to obtain optimal network partition for the target domain. From the theoretical viewpoint, we equivalently decompose MCS into two simpler subproblems with analytical solutions, which can be efficiently solved by their computational procedures. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data sets empirically demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach in terms of both prediction performance and domain selection ability.