Learning in the presence of concept drift and hidden contexts

Abstract

On-line learning in domains where the target concept depends on some hidden context poses serious problems A changing context can induce changes in the target concepts, producing what is known as concept drift. We describe a family of learning algorithms that flexibly react lo concept drift and can take advantage of situations where contexts reappear the general approach undeilying all these algorithms consists of (1) keeping only a window of currently trusted examples and hypotheses. (2) storing concept descriptions and re-using them when a previous context re-appears; and (3) controlling both of these functions by a heuristic that constantly monitors the system's behavior. The paper reports on experiments that test the system', performance under various conditions such as different levels of noise and different extent and rate ot concept drift. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers,.