Droplet Ensemble Learning on Drifting Data Streams

Abstract

Ensemble learning methods for evolving data streams are extremely powerful learning methods since they combine the predictions of a set of classifiers, to improve the performance of the best single classifier inside the ensemble. In this paper we introduce the Droplet Ensemble Algorithm (DEA), a new method for learning on data streams subject to concept drifts which combines ensemble and instance based learning. Contrarily to state of the art ensemble methods which select the base learners according to their performances on recent observations, DEA dynamically selects the subset of base learners which is the best suited for the region of the feature space where the latest observation was received. Experiments on 25 datasets (most of which being commonly used as benchmark in the literature) reproducing different type of drifts show that this new method achieves excellent results on accuracy and ranking against SAM KNN [1], all of its base learners and a majority vote algorithm using the same base learners.