An Efficient and Sensitive Decision Tree Approach to Mining Concept-Drifting Data Streams

Data stream mining has become a novel research topic of growing interest in knowledge discovery. Most proposed algorithms for data stream mining assume that each data block is basically a random sample from a stationary distribution, but many databases available violate this assumption. That is, the class of an instance may change over time, known as concept drift. In this paper, we propose a Sensitive Concept Drift Probing Decision Tree algorithm (SCRIPT), which is based on the statistical X² test, to handle the concept drift problem on data streams. Compared with the proposed methods, the advantages of SCRIPT include: a) it can avoid unnecessary system cost for stable data streams; b) it can immediately and efficiently corrects original classifier while data streams are instable; c) it is more suitable to the applications in which a sensitive detection of concept drift is required.