Meta-forests: Domain generalization on random forests with meta-learning

Domain generalization is a popular machine learning technique that enables models to perform well on the unseen target domain, by learning from multiple source domains. Domain generalization is useful in cases where data is limited, difficult, or expensive to collect, such as in object recognition and biomedicine. In this paper, we propose a novel domain generalization algorithm called "meta-forests", which builds upon the basic random forests model by incorporating the meta-learning strategy and maximum mean discrepancy measure. The aim of meta-forests is to enhance the generalization ability of classifiers by reducing the correlation among trees and increasing their strength. More specifically, meta-forests conducts meta-learning optimization during each meta-task, while also utilizing the maximum mean discrepancy as a regularization term to penalize poor generalization performance in the meta-test process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we test it on two publicly object recognition datasets and a glucose monitoring dataset that we have used in a previous study. Our results show that meta-forests outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of generalization performance on both object recognition and glucose monitoring datasets.