Advances on Concept Drift Detection in Regression Tasks using Social Networks Theory

Mining data streams is one of the main studies in machine learning area due to its application in many knowledge areas. One of the major challenges on mining data streams is concept drift, which requires the learner to discard the current concept and adapt to a new one. Ensemble-based drift detection algorithms have been used successfully to the classification task but usually maintain a fixed size ensemble of learners running the risk of needlessly spending processing time and memory. In this paper we present improvements to the Scale-free Network Regressor (SFNR), a dynamic ensemble-based method for regression that employs social networks theory. In order to detect concept drifts SFNR uses the Adaptive Window (ADWIN) algorithm. Results show improvements in accuracy, especially in concept drift situations and better performance compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms in both real and synthetic data

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

Look At Me, No Replay! SurpriseNet: Anomaly Detection Inspired Class Incremental Learning

Continual learning aims to create artificial neural networks capable of accumulating knowledge and skills through incremental training on a sequence of tasks. The main challenge of continual learning is catastrophic interference, wherein new knowledge overrides or interferes with past knowledge, leading to forgetting. An associated issue is the problem of learning "cross-task knowledge," where models fail to acquire and retain knowledge that helps differentiate classes across task boundaries. A common solution to both problems is "replay," where a limited buffer of past instances is utilized to learn cross-task knowledge and mitigate catastrophic interference. However, a notable drawback of these methods is their tendency to overfit the limited replay buffer. In contrast, our proposed solution, SurpriseNet, addresses catastrophic interference by employing a parameter isolation method and learning cross-task knowledge using an auto-encoder inspired by anomaly detection. SurpriseNet is applicable to both structured and unstructured data, as it does not rely on image-specific inductive biases. We have conducted empirical experiments demonstrating the strengths of SurpriseNet on various traditional vision continual-learning benchmarks, as well as on structured data datasets. Source code made available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8247906 and https://github.com/tachyonicClock/SurpriseNet-CIKM-2

A Survey on Semi-Supervised Learning for Delayed Partially Labelled Data Streams

Unlabelled data appear in many domains and are particularly relevant to streaming applications, where even though data is abundant, labelled data is rare. To address the learning problems associated with such data, one can ignore the unlabelled data and focus only on the labelled data (supervised learning); use the labelled data and attempt to leverage the unlabelled data (semi-supervised learning); or assume some labels will be available on request (active learning). The first approach is the simplest, yet the amount of labelled data available will limit the predictive performance. The second relies on finding and exploiting the underlying characteristics of the data distribution. The third depends on an external agent to provide the required labels in a timely fashion. This survey pays special attention to methods that leverage unlabelled data in a semi-supervised setting. We also discuss the delayed labelling issue, which impacts both fully supervised and semi-supervised methods. We propose a unified problem setting, discuss the learning guarantees and existing methods, explain the differences between related problem settings. Finally, we review the current benchmarking practices and propose adaptations to enhance them

Adaptive random forests for evolving data stream classification

Random forests is currently one of the most used machine learning algorithms in the non-streaming (batch) setting. This preference is attributable to its high learning performance and low demands with respect to input preparation and hyper-parameter tuning. However, in the challenging context of evolving data streams, there is no random forests algorithm that can be considered state-of-the-art in comparison to bagging and boosting based algorithms. In this work, we present the adaptive random forest (ARF) algorithm for classification of evolving data streams. In contrast to previous attempts of replicating random forests for data stream learning, ARF includes an effective resampling method and adaptive operators that can cope with different types of concept drifts without complex optimizations for different data sets. We present experiments with a parallel implementation of ARF which has no degradation in terms of classification performance in comparison to a serial implementation, since trees and adaptive operators are independent from one another. Finally, we compare ARF with state-of-the-art algorithms in a traditional test-then-train evaluation and a novel delayed labelling evaluation, and show that ARF is accurate and uses a feasible amount of resources

Boosting decision stumps for dynamic feature selection on data streams

Feature selection targets the identification of which features of a dataset are relevant to the learning task. It is also widely known and used to improve computation times, reduce computation requirements, and to decrease the impact of the curse of dimensionality and enhancing the generalization rates of classifiers. In data streams, classifiers shall benefit from all the items above, but more importantly, from the fact that the relevant subset of features may drift over time. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic feature selection method for data streams called Adaptive Boosting for Feature Selection (ABFS). ABFS chains decision stumps and drift detectors, and as a result, identifies which features are relevant to the learning task as the stream progresses with reasonable success. In addition to our proposed algorithm, we bring feature selection-specific metrics from batch learning to streaming scenarios. Next, we evaluate ABFS according to these metrics in both synthetic and real-world scenarios. As a result, ABFS improves the classification rates of different types of learners and eventually enhances computational resources usage

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)

River: Machine learning for streaming data in Python

River is a machine learning library for dynamic data streams and continual learning. It provides multiple state-of-the-art learning methods, data generators/transformers, performance metrics and evaluators for different stream learning problems. It is the result from the merger of two popular packages for stream learning in Python: Creme and scikit- multiow. River introduces a revamped architecture based on the lessons learnt from the seminal packages. River's ambition is to be the go-to library for doing machine learning on streaming data. Additionally, this open source package brings under the same um-brella a large community of practitioners and researchers. The source code is available at https://github.com/online-ml/river

Unsupervised concept drift detection using a student–teacher approach

Concept drift detection is a crucial task in data stream evolving environments. Most of state of the art approaches designed to tackle this problem monitor the loss of predictive models. However, this approach falls short in many real-world scenarios, where the true labels are not readily available to compute the loss. In this context, there is increasing attention to approaches that perform concept drift detection in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without access to the true labels after the model is deployed. We propose a novel approach to unsupervised concept drift detection based on a student-teacher learning paradigm. Essentially, we create an auxiliary model (student) to mimic the primary model’s behaviour (teacher). At run-time, our approach is to use the teacher for predicting new instances and monitoring the mimicking loss of the student for concept drift detection. In a set of experiments using 19 data streams, we show that the proposed approach can detect concept drift and present a competitive behaviour relative to the state of the art approaches