# Evaluating k-NN in the Classification of Data Streams with Concept Drift

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03119/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Learning under Concept Drift: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05785/) (2020)
- [Distance and Similarity Measures Effect on the Performance of K-Nearest Neighbor Classifier -- A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04321/) (2017)
- [Concept Drift Detection from Multi-Class Imbalanced Data Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10228/) (2021)
- [Recurring Concept Meta-learning for Evolving Data Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08848/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data streams are often defined as large amounts of data flowing continuously at high speed. Moreover, these data are likely subject to changes in data distribution, known as concept drift. Given all the reasons mentioned above, learning from streams is often online and under restrictions of memory consumption and run-time. Although many classification algorithms exist, most of the works published in the area use Naive Bayes (NB) and Hoeffding Trees (HT) as base learners in their experiments. This article proposes an in-depth evaluation of k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) as a candidate for classifying data streams subjected to concept drift. It also analyses the complexity in time and the two main parameters of k-NN, i.e., the number of nearest neighbors used for predictions (k), and window size (w). We compare different parameter values for k-NN and contrast it to NB and HT both with and without a drift detector (RDDM) in many datasets. We formulated and answered 10 research questions which led to the conclusion that k-NN is a worthy candidate for data stream classification, especially when the run-time constraint is not too restrictive.