Concept tracking and adaptation for drifting data streams under extreme verification latency

Abstract

When analyzing large-scale streaming data towards resolving classification problems, it is often assumed that true labels of the incoming data are available right after being predicted. This assumption allows online learning models to efficiently detect and accommodate non-stationarities in the distribution of the arriving data (concept drift). However, this assumption does not hold in many practical scenarios where a delay exists between predicted and class labels, to the point of lacking this supervision for an infinite period of time (extreme verification latency). In this case, the development of learning algorithms capable of adapting to drifting environments without any external supervision remains a challenging research area to date. In this context, this work proposes a simple yet effective learning technique to classify non-stationary data streams under extreme verification latency. The intuition motivating the design of our technique is to predict the trajectory of concepts in the feature space. The estimation of the region where concepts may reside in the future can be then exploited for producing more updated predictions for newly arriving examples, ultimately enhancing its accuracy during this unsupervised drifting period. Our approach is compared to a benchmark of incremental and static learning methods over a set of public non-stationary synthetic datasets. Results obtained by our passive learning method are promising and encourage further research aimed at generalizing its applicability to other types of drifts.