Learning with previously unseen features

Abstract

We study the problem of improving a machine learning model by identifying and using features that are not in the training set. This is applicable to machine learning systems deployed in an open environment. For example, a prediction model built on a set of sensors may be improved when it has access to new and relevant sensors at test time. To effectively use new features, we propose a novel approach that learns a model over both the original and new features, with the goal of making the joint distribution of features and predicted labels similar to that in the training set. Our approach can naturally leverage labels associated with these new features when they are accessible. We present an efficient optimization algorithm for learning the model parameters and empirically evaluate the approach on several regression and classification tasks. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve on average 11.2% improvement over baselines.