Population-aware Hierarchical Bayesian Domain Adaptation

Abstract: Population attributes are essential in health for understanding who the data represents and precision medicine efforts. Even within disease infection labels, patients can exhibit significant variability; "fever" may mean something different when reported in a doctor's office versus from an online app, precluding directly learning across different datasets for the same prediction task. This problem falls into the domain adaptation paradigm. However, research in this area has to-date not considered who generates the data; symptoms reported by a woman versus a man, for example, could also have different implications. We propose a novel population-aware domain adaptation approach by formulating the domain adaptation task as a multi-source hierarchical Bayesian framework. The model improves prediction in the case of largely unlabelled target data by harnessing both domain and population invariant information.