An active learning method for data streams with concept drift

Abstract

In analyzing streaming data in which the underlying data distribution may change or the concept of interest may drift over time, the ability of a classifier to adapt to drifted concepts is very important to maintaining the prediction performance. However, the true class labels of data samples are often available only after some period of time or they are obtained by experts' efforts. In this paper, we develop an effective method for active learning on data streams with concept drift. The proposed method combines active learning and adaptive incremental learning. For unlabeled data samples, the degree of concept drift is estimated and used for both data selection for labeling and adaptive incremental learning of the current classifier. Experimental results on five artificial data sets and two real data sets demonstrate a competent performance of the proposed method.