English

Exponentially Weighted Moving Average Charts for Detecting Concept Drift

Machine Learning 2012-12-27 v1 Machine Learning Applications

Abstract

Classifying streaming data requires the development of methods which are computationally efficient and able to cope with changes in the underlying distribution of the stream, a phenomenon known in the literature as concept drift. We propose a new method for detecting concept drift which uses an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) chart to monitor the misclassification rate of an streaming classifier. Our approach is modular and can hence be run in parallel with any underlying classifier to provide an additional layer of concept drift detection. Moreover our method is computationally efficient with overhead O(1) and works in a fully online manner with no need to store data points in memory. Unlike many existing approaches to concept drift detection, our method allows the rate of false positive detections to be controlled and kept constant over time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1212.6018,
  title  = {Exponentially Weighted Moving Average Charts for Detecting Concept Drift},
  author = {Gordon J. Ross and Niall M. Adams and Dimitris K. Tasoulis and David J. Hand},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.6018},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:59:59.475Z