# Domain shift and domain adaptation (cell line to patient)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/domain-adaptation/  
OnCo record `domain-adaptation` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Domain shift is the mismatch between the data a model was trained on and the data it meets later (cell lines versus tumours, one sequencing platform versus another); domain adaptation is the family of methods that try to bridge it.

## Summary

Domain adaptation addresses training a model on one data distribution and applying it to a related but different one (Wikipedia). Cell-line screens are the training data for drug response but patients are the goal, so methods such as PRECISE and TRANSACT (Mourragui and colleagues) align the two distributions in a shared subspace and TUGDA (Peres da Silva and colleagues) weights tasks by their uncertainty during adaptation. Platform shift between RNA-seq and microarray is the same problem one level down.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: domain shift; distribution shift; domain adaptation; cell-line to patient transfer; TUGDA; Velodrome; PRECISE; TRANSACT; train-test mismatch
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/domain-adaptation.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_adaptation
- Peres da Silva et al., TUGDA: task uncertainty guided domain adaptation for robust generalization of cancer drug response prediction (Bioinformatics 2021): https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab299
- Mourragui et al., PRECISE (Bioinformatics 2019): https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz372
- Mourragui et al., TRANSACT (PNAS 2021): https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106682118
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_adaptation

## Connected records

- terms: [Batch effects and harmonisation](https://onco.cc/terms/batch-effects/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Cell lines as a proxy for patients](https://onco.cc/terms/cell-lines-as-proxy/), [External validation](https://onco.cc/terms/external-validation/), [Out-of-distribution detection (Mahalanobis guard)](https://onco.cc/terms/ood-detection/), [Quantile normalisation, rank transforms and z-scores](https://onco.cc/terms/quantile-normalisation/)

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