Concept-drifting Data Streams are Time Series; The Case for Continuous Adaptation

Learning from data streams is an increasingly important topic in data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in general. A major focus in the data stream literature is on designing methods that can deal with concept drift, a challenge where the generating distribution changes over time. A general assumption in most of this literature is that instances are independently distributed in the stream. In this work we show that, in the context of concept drift, this assumption is contradictory, and that the presence of concept drift necessarily implies temporal dependence; and thus some form of time series. This has important implications on model design and deployment. We explore and highlight the these implications, and show that Hoeffding-tree based ensembles, which are very popular for learning in streams, are not naturally suited to learning within drift; and can perform in this scenario only at significant computational cost of destructive adaptation. On the other hand, we develop and parameterize gradient-descent methods and demonstrate how they can perform continuous adaptation with no explicit drift-detection mechanism, offering major advantages in terms of accuracy and efficiency. As a consequence of our theoretical discussion and empirical observations, we outline a number of recommendations for deploying methods in concept-drifting streams.