Partial drift detection using a rule induction framework

The major challenge in mining data streams is the issue of concept drift, the tendency of the underlying data generation process to change over time. In this paper, we propose a general rule learning framework that can efficiently handle concept-drifting data streams and maintain a highly accurate classification model. The main idea is to focus on partial drifts by allowing individual rules to monitor the stream and detect if there is a drift in the regions they cover. A rule quality measure then decides whether the affected rules are inconsistent with the concept drift. The model is accordingly updated to only include rules that are consistent with the newly arrived concept. A dynamically maintained set of instances deemed relevant to the most recent concept is also kept at memory. Learning a new concept from a larger set of instances reduces the variance of data distribution and allows for a more accurate, stable classification model. Our experiments show that this approach not only handles the drift efficiently, but it also can provide higher classification accuracy compared to other competitive approaches on a variety of real and synthetic data sets.