Performing Multi-Target Regression via a Parameter Sharing-Based Deep Network

Abstract

Multi-target regression (MTR) comprises the prediction of multiple continuous target variables from a common set of input variables. There are two major challenges when addressing the MTR problem: the exploration of the inter-target dependencies and the modeling of complex input–output relationships. This paper proposes a neural network model that is able to simultaneously address these two challenges in a flexible way. A deep architecture well suited for learning multiple continuous outputs is designed, providing some flexibility to model the inter-target relationships by sharing network parameters as well as the possibility to exploit target-specific patterns by learning a set of nonshared parameters for each target. The effectiveness of the proposal is analyzed through an extensive experimental study on 18 datasets, demonstrating the benefits of using a shared representation that exploits the commonalities between target variables. According to the experimental results, the proposed model is competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art in MTR.