A classifier graph based recurring concept detection and prediction approach

It is common in real-world data streams that previously seen concepts will reappear, which suggests a unique kind of concept drift, known as recurring concepts. Unfortunately, most of existing algorithms do not take full account of this case. Motivated by this challenge, a novel paradigm was proposed for capturing and exploiting recurring concepts in data streams. It not only incorporates a distribution-based change detector for handling concept drift but also captures recurring concept by storing recurring concepts in a classifier graph. The possibility of detecting recurring drifts allows reusing previously learnt models and enhancing the overall learning performance. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data streams reveal that the approach performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms, especially when concepts reappear

A survey on online active learning

Online active learning is a paradigm in machine learning that aims to select the most informative data points to label from a data stream. The problem of minimizing the cost associated with collecting labeled observations has gained a lot of attention in recent years, particularly in real-world applications where data is only available in an unlabeled form. Annotating each observation can be time-consuming and costly, making it difficult to obtain large amounts of labeled data. To overcome this issue, many active learning strategies have been proposed in the last decades, aiming to select the most informative observations for labeling in order to improve the performance of machine learning models. These approaches can be broadly divided into two categories: static pool-based and stream-based active learning. Pool-based active learning involves selecting a subset of observations from a closed pool of unlabeled data, and it has been the focus of many surveys and literature reviews. However, the growing availability of data streams has led to an increase in the number of approaches that focus on online active learning, which involves continuously selecting and labeling observations as they arrive in a stream. This work aims to provide an overview of the most recently proposed approaches for selecting the most informative observations from data streams in the context of online active learning. We review the various techniques that have been proposed and discuss their strengths and limitations, as well as the challenges and opportunities that exist in this area of research. Our review aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the field and to highlight directions for future work

Email classification via intention-based segmentation

Email is the most popular way of personal and official communication among people and organizations. Due to untrusted virtual environment, email systems may face frequent attacks like malware, spamming, social engineering, etc. Spamming is the most common malicious activity, where unsolicited emails are sent in bulk, and these spam emails can be the source of malware, waste resources, hence degrade the productivity. In spam filter development, the most important challenge is to find the correlation between the nature of spam and the interest of the users because the interests of users are dynamic. This paper proposes a novel dynamic spam filter model that considers the changes in the interests of users with time while handling the spam activities. It uses intention-based segmentation to compare different segments of text documents instead of comparing them as a whole. The proposed spam filter is a multi-tier approach where initially, the email content is divided into segments with the help of part of speech (POS) tagging based on voices and tenses. Further, the segments are clustered using hierarchical clustering and compared using the vector space model. In the third stage, concept drift is detected in the clusters to identify the change in the interest of the user. Later, the classification of ham emails into various categories is done in the last stage. For experiments Enron dataset is used and the obtained results are promising

Handling Concept Drift in the Context of Expensive Labels

Machine learning has been successfully applied to a wide range of prediction problems, yet its application to data streams can be complicated by concept drift. Existing approaches to handling concept drift are overwhelmingly reliant on the assumption that it is possible to obtain the true label of an instance shortly after classification at a negligible cost. The aim of this thesis is to examine, and attempt to address, some of the problems related to handling concept drift when the cost of obtaining labels is high. This thesis presents Decision Value Sampling (DVS), a novel concept drift handling approach which periodically chooses a small number of the most useful instances to label. The newly labelled instances are then used to re-train the classifier, an SVM with a linear kernel, to handle any change in concept that might occur. In this way, only the instances that are required to keep the classifier up-to-date are labelled. The evaluation of the system indicates that a classifier can be kept up-to-date with changes in concept while only requiring 15% of the data stream to be labelled. In a data stream with a high throughput this represents a significant reduction in the number of labels required. The second novel concept drift handling approach proposed in this thesis is Confidence Distribution Batch Detection (CDBD). CDBD uses a heuristic based on the distribution of an SVM’s confidence in its predictions to decide when to rebuild the clas- sifier. The evaluation shows that CDBD can be used to reliably detect when a change in concept has taken place and that concept drift can be handled if the classifier is rebuilt when CDBD sig- nals a change in concept. The evaluation also shows that CDBD obtains a considerable labels saving as it only requires labelled data when a change in concept has been detected. The two concept drift handling approaches deal with concept drift in a different manner, DVS continuously adapts the clas- sifier, whereas CDBD only adapts the classifier when a sizeable change in concept is suspected. They reflect a divide also found in the literature, between continuous rebuild approaches (like DVS) and triggered rebuild approaches (like CDBD). The final major contribution in this thesis is a comparison between continuous and triggered rebuild approaches, as this is an underexplored area. An empirical comparison between representative techniques from both types of approaches shows that triggered rebuild works slightly better on large datasets where the changes in concepts occur infrequently, but in general a continuous rebuild approach works the best