[Submitted on 8 May 2020]

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Abstract: Multitask Learning is a learning paradigm that deals with multiple different
tasks in parallel and transfers knowledge among them. XOF, a Learning
Classifier System using tree-based programs to encode building blocks
(meta-features), constructs and collects features with rich discriminative
information for classification tasks in an observed list. This paper seeks to
facilitate the automation of feature transferring in between tasks by utilising
the observed list. We hypothesise that the best discriminative features of a
classification task carry its characteristics. Therefore, the relatedness
between any two tasks can be estimated by comparing their most appropriate
patterns. We propose a multiple-XOF system, called mXOF, that can dynamically
adapt feature transfer among XOFs. This system utilises the observed list to
estimate the task relatedness. This method enables the automation of
transferring features. In terms of knowledge discovery, the resemblance
estimation provides insightful relations among multiple data. We experimented
mXOF on various scenarios, e.g. representative Hierarchical Boolean problems,
classification of distinct classes in the UCI Zoo dataset, and unrelated tasks,
to validate its abilities of automatic knowledge-transfer and estimating task
relatedness. Results show that mXOF can estimate the relatedness reasonably
between multiple tasks to aid the learning performance with the dynamic feature
transferring.