A new concept drift detection method based on the ranking of features in a data stream

Abstract

The article presents a new concept drift detection method based on analyzing the importance of features of instances in the data stream. The data stream contains information about distribution patterns that reflect different concepts that may be hidden in the data stream. The presented drift detector concept uses information about the fluctuation of the most informative feature inside chunks of the data stream and compares it with the change of the same feature in neighbor chunks. In the case of data streams, the meaning of features can change over time. These changes affect the quality of the classification but can also be a significant indicator of ongoing concept drift. After detecting the drift, the classifier should be trained with the new dataset. But this issue is not addressed in this article.In this work, we propose a new concept drift detector in the data stream for the first time. This goal is achieved by observing the changing importance of features in different parts of the data stream. The proposed approach uses the feature significance measure as a drift detector. The obtained results indicate that the method can be introduced in practice. Because these are only preliminary results, in this paper, we focused on presenting the advantages of our strategy without comparison with other methods.