Adapting to Latent Subgroup Shifts via Concepts and Proxies

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation when the source domain diﬀers from the target domain because of a shift in the distribution of a latent subgroup. When this subgroup confounds all observed data, neither covariate shift nor label shift assumptions apply. We show that the optimal target predictor can be non-parametrically identiﬁed with the help of concept and proxy variables available only in the source domain, and unlabeled data from the target. The identiﬁcation results are constructive, immediately suggesting an algorithm for estimating the optimal predictor in the target. For continuous observations, when this algorithm becomes impractical, we propose a latent variable model speciﬁc to the data generation process at hand. We show how the approach degrades as the size of the shift changes, and verify that it outperforms both covariate and label shift adjustment.