A survey on feature drift adaptation: Definition, benchmark, challenges and future directions

Data stream mining is a fast growing research topic due to the ubiquity of data in several real-world problems. Given their ephemeral nature, data stream sources are expected to undergo changes in data distribution, a phenomenon called concept drift. This paper focuses on one specific type of drift that has not yet been thoroughly studied, namely feature drift. Feature drift occurs whenever a subset of features becomes, or ceases to be, relevant to the learning task; thus, learners must detect and adapt to these changes accordingly. We survey existing work on feature drift adaptation with both explicit and implicit approaches. Additionally, we benchmark several algorithms and a naive feature drift detection approach using synthetic and real-world datasets. The results from our experiments indicate the need for future research in this area as even naive approaches produced gains in accuracy while reducing resources usage. Finally, we state current research topics, challenges and future directions for feature drift adaptation

Concept Drift Detection in Data Stream Mining: The Review of Contemporary Literature

Mining process such as classification, clustering of progressive or dynamic data is a critical objective of the information retrieval and knowledge discovery; in particular, it is more sensitive in data stream mining models due to the possibility of significant change in the type and dimensionality of the data over a period. The influence of these changes over the mining process termed as concept drift. The concept drift that depict often in streaming data causes unbalanced performance of the mining models adapted. Hence, it is obvious to boost the mining models to predict and analyse the concept drift to achieve the performance at par best. The contemporary literature evinced significant contributions to handle the concept drift, which fall in to supervised, unsupervised learning, and statistical assessment approaches. This manuscript contributes the detailed review of the contemporary concept-drift detection models depicted in recent literature. The contribution of the manuscript includes the nomenclature of the concept drift models and their impact of imbalanced data tuples

On ensemble techniques for data stream regression

An ensemble of learners tends to exceed the predictive performance of individual learners. This approach has been explored for both batch and online learning. Ensembles methods applied to data stream classification were thoroughly investigated over the years, while their regression counterparts received less attention in comparison. In this work, we discuss and analyze several techniques for generating, aggregating, and updating ensembles of regressors for evolving data streams. We investigate the impact of different strategies for inducing diversity into the ensemble by randomizing the input data (resampling, random subspaces and random patches). On top of that, we devote particular attention to techniques that adapt the ensemble model in response to concept drifts, including adaptive window approaches, fixed periodical resets and randomly determined windows. Extensive empirical experiments show that simple techniques can obtain similar predictive performance to sophisticated algorithms that rely on reactive adaptation (i.e., concept drift detection and recovery)

A New Large Scale SVM for Classification of Imbalanced Evolving Streams

Classification from imbalanced evolving streams possesses a combined challenge of class imbalance and concept drift (CI-CD). However, the state of imbalance is dynamic, a kind of virtual concept drift. The imbalanced distributions and concept drift hinder the online learner’s performance as a combined or individual problem. A weighted hybrid online oversampling approach,”weighted online oversampling large scale support vector machine (WOOLASVM),” is proposed in this work to address this combined problem. The WOOLASVM is an SVM active learning approach with new boundary weighing strategies such as (i) dynamically oversampling the current boundary and (ii) dynamic weighing of the cost parameter of the SVM objective function. Thus at any time step, WOOLASVM maintains balanced class distributions so that the CI-CD problem does not hinder the online learner performance. Over extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world streams with the static and dynamic state of imbalance, the WOOLASVM exhibits better online classification performances than other state-of-the-art methods

SMOClust: Synthetic Minority Oversampling based on Stream Clustering for Evolving Data Streams

Many real-world data stream applications not only suffer from concept drift but also class imbalance. Yet, very few existing studies investigated this joint challenge. Data difficulty factors, which have been shown to be key challenges in class imbalanced data streams, are not taken into account by existing approaches when learning class imbalanced data streams. In this work, we propose a drift adaptable oversampling strategy to synthesise minority class examples based on stream clustering. The motivation is that stream clustering methods continuously update themselves to reflect the characteristics of the current underlying concept, including data difficulty factors. This nature can potentially be used to compress past information without caching data in the memory explicitly. Based on the compressed information, synthetic examples can be created within the region that recently generated new minority class examples. Experiments with artificial and real-world data streams show that the proposed approach can handle concept drift involving different minority class decomposition better than existing approaches, especially when the data stream is severely class imbalanced and presenting high proportions of safe and borderline minority class examples.Comment: 59 pages, 85 figure

AMANDA : density-based adaptive model for nonstationary data under extreme verification latency scenarios

Gradual concept-drift refers to a smooth and gradual change in the relations between input and output data in the underlying distribution over time. The problem generates a model obsolescence and consequently a quality decrease in predictions. Besides, there is a challenging task during the stream: The extreme verification latency (EVL) to verify the labels. For batch scenarios, state-of-the-art methods propose an adaptation of a supervised model by using an unconstrained least squares importance fitting (uLSIF) algorithm or a semi-supervised approach along with a core support extraction (CSE) method. However, these methods do not properly tackle the mentioned problems due to their high computational time for large data volumes, lack in representing the right samples of the drift or even for having several parameters for tuning. Therefore, we propose a density-based adaptive model for nonstationary data (AMANDA), which uses a semi-supervised classifier along with a CSE method. AMANDA has two variations: AMANDA with a fixed cutting percentage (AMANDA-FCP); and AMANDA with a dynamic cutting percentage (AMANDADCP). Our results indicate that the two variations of AMANDA outperform the state-of-the-art methods for almost all synthetic datasets and real ones with an improvement up to 27.98% regarding the average error. We have found that the use of AMANDA-FCP improved the results for a gradual concept-drift even with a small size of initial labeled data. Moreover, our results indicate that SSL classifiers are improved when they work along with our static or dynamic CSE methods. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of research directions based on this approach.Concept-drift gradual refere-se à mudança suave e gradual na distribuição dos dados conforme o tempo passa. Este problema causa obsolescência no modelo de aprendizado e queda na qualidade das previsões. Além disso, existe um complicador durante o processamento dos dados: a latência de verificação extrema (LVE) para se verificar os rótulos. Métodos do estado da arte propõem uma adaptação do modelo supervisionado usando uma abordagem de estimação de importância baseado em mínimos quadrados ou usando uma abordagem semi-supervisionada em conjunto com a extração de instâncias centrais, na sigla em inglês (CSE). Entretanto, estes métodos não tratam adequadamente os problemas mencionados devido ao fato de requererem alto tempo computacional para processar grandes volumes de dados, falta de correta seleção das instâncias que representam a mudança da distribuição, ou ainda por demandarem o ajuste de grande quantidade de parâmetros. Portanto, propomos um modelo adaptativo baseado em densidades para dados não-estacionários (AMANDA), que tem como base um classificador semi-supervisionado e um método CSE baseado em densidade. AMANDA tem duas variações: percentual de corte fixo (AMANDAFCP); e percentual de corte dinâmico (AMANDA-DCP). Nossos resultados indicam que as duas variações da proposta superam o estado da arte em quase todas as bases de dados sintéticas e reais em até 27,98% em relação ao erro médio. Concluímos que a aplicação do método AMANDA-FCP faz com que a classificação melhore mesmo quando há uma pequena porção inicial de dados rotulados. Mais ainda, os classificadores semi-supervisionados são melhorados quando trabalham em conjunto com nossos métodos de CSE, estático ou dinâmico

COMPOSE: Compacted object sample extraction a framework for semi-supervised learning in nonstationary environments

An increasing number of real-world applications are associated with streaming data drawn from drifting and nonstationary distributions. These applications demand new algorithms that can learn and adapt to such changes, also known as concept drift. Proper characterization of such data with existing approaches typically requires substantial amount of labeled instances, which may be difficult, expensive, or even impractical to obtain. In this thesis, compacted object sample extraction (COMPOSE) is introduced - a computational geometry-based framework to learn from nonstationary streaming data - where labels are unavailable (or presented very sporadically) after initialization. The feasibility and performance of the algorithm are evaluated on several synthetic and real-world data sets, which present various different scenarios of initially labeled streaming environments. On carefully designed synthetic data sets, we also compare the performance of COMPOSE against the optimal Bayes classifier, as well as the arbitrary subpopulation tracker algorithm, which addresses a similar environment referred to as extreme verification latency. Furthermore, using the real-world National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather data set, we demonstrate that COMPOSE is competitive even with a well-established and fully supervised nonstationary learning algorithm that receives labeled data in every batch