Interdisciplinary collaborations have generated huge impact to society. However, it is often hard for researchers to establish such cross-domain collaborations. What are the patterns of cross-domain collaborations? How do those collaborations form? Can we predict this type of collaborations? Cross-domain collaborations exhibit very different patterns compared to traditional collaborations in the same domain: 1) sparse connection: cross-domain collaborations are rare; 2) complementary expertise:

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... cross-domain collaborators often have different expertise and interest; 3) topic skewness: cross-domain collaboration topics are focused on a subset of topics. All these patterns violate fundamental assumptions of traditional recommendation systems. In this paper, we analyze the cross-domain collaboration data from research publications and confirm the above patterns. We propose the Cross-domain Topic Learning (CTL) model to address these challenges. For handling sparse connections, CTL consolidates the existing cross-domain collaborations through topic layers instead of at author layers, which alleviates the sparseness issue. For handling complementary expertise, CTL models topic distributions from source and target domains separately, as well as the correlation across domains. For handling topic skewness, CTL only models relevant topics to the cross-domain collaboration. We compare CTL with several baseline approaches on large publication datasets from different domains. CTL outperforms baselines significantly on multiple recommendation metrics. Beyond accurate recommendation performance, CTL is also insensitive to parameter tuning as confirmed in the sensitivity analysis.