Incremental Learning with Concept Drift Detection and Prototype-based Embeddings for Graph Stream Classification

Data stream mining aims at extracting meaningful knowledge from continually evolving data streams, addressing the challenges posed by nonstationary environments, particularly, concept drift which refers to a change in the underlying data distribution over time. Graph structures offer a powerful modelling tool to represent complex systems, such as, critical infrastructure systems and social networks. Learning from graph streams becomes a necessity to understand the dynamics of graph structures and to facilitate informed decision-making. This work introduces a novel method for graph stream classification which operates under the general setting where a data generating process produces graphs with varying nodes and edges over time. The method uses incremental learning for continual model adaptation, selecting representative graphs (prototypes) for each class, and creating graph embeddings. Additionally, it incorporates a loss-based concept drift detection mechanism to recalculate graph prototypes when drift is detected.

A Study of Data-driven Methods for Adaptive Forecasting of COVID-19 Cases

Severe acute respiratory disease SARS-CoV-2 has had a found impact on public health systems and healthcare emergency response especially with respect to making decisions on the most effective measures to be taken at any given time. As demonstrated throughout the last three years with COVID-19, the prediction of the number of positive cases can be an effective way to facilitate decision-making. However, the limited availability of data and the highly dynamic and uncertain nature of the virus transmissibility makes this task very challenging. Aiming at investigating these challenges and in order to address this problem, this work studies data-driven (learning, statistical) methods for incrementally training models to adapt to these nonstationary conditions. An extensive empirical study is conducted to examine various characteristics, such as, performance analysis on a per virus wave basis, feature extraction, "lookback" window size, memory size, all for next-, 7-, and 14-day forecasting tasks. We demonstrate that the incremental learning framework can successfully address the aforementioned challenges and perform well during outbreaks, providing accurate predictions.

Autoencoder-based Anomaly Detection in Streaming Data with Incremental Learning and Concept Drift Adaptation

In our digital universe nowadays, enormous amount of data are produced in a streaming manner in a variety of application areas. These data are often unlabelled. In this case, identifying infrequent events, such as anomalies, poses a great challenge. This problem becomes even more difficult in non-stationary environments, which can cause deterioration of the predictive performance of a model. To address the above challenges, the paper proposes an autoencoder-based incremental learning method with drift detection (strAEm++DD). Our proposed method strAEm++DD leverages on the advantages of both incremental learning and drift detection. We conduct an experimental study using real-world and synthetic datasets with severe or extreme class imbalance, and provide an empirical analysis of strAEm++DD. We further conduct a comparative study, showing that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing baseline and advanced methods.

Unsupervised Unlearning of Concept Drift with Autoencoders

The phenomena of concept drift refers to a change of the data distribution affecting the data stream of future samples -- such non-stationary environments are often encountered in the real world. Consequently, learning models operating on the data stream might become obsolete, and need costly and difficult adjustments such as retraining or adaptation. Existing methods to address concept drift are, typically, categorised as active or passive. The former continually adapt a model using incremental learning, while the latter perform a complete model retraining when a drift detection mechanism triggers an alarm. We depart from the traditional avenues and propose for the first time an alternative approach which "unlearns" the effects of the concept drift. Specifically, we propose an autoencoder-based method for "unlearning" the concept drift in an unsupervised manner, without having to retrain or adapt any of the learning models operating on the data.

Data augmentation on-the-fly and active learning in data stream classification

There is an emerging need for predictive models to be trained on-the-fly, since in numerous machine learning applications data are arriving in an online fashion. A critical challenge encountered is that of limited availability of ground truth information (e.g., labels in classification tasks) as new data are observed one-by-one online, while another significant challenge is that of class imbalance. This work introduces the novel Augmented Queues method, which addresses the dual-problem by combining in a synergistic manner online active learning, data augmentation, and a multi-queue memory to maintain separate and balanced queues for each class. We perform an extensive experimental study using image and time-series augmentations, in which we examine the roles of the active learning budget, memory size, imbalance level, and neural network type. We demonstrate two major advantages of Augmented Queues. First, it does not reserve additional memory space as the generation of synthetic data occurs only at training times. Second, learning models have access to more labelled data without the need to increase the active learning budget and / or the original memory size. Learning on-the-fly poses major challenges which, typically, hinder the deployment of learning models. Augmented Queues significantly improves the performance in terms of learning quality and speed. Our code is made publicly available.

A Hybrid Active-Passive Approach to Imbalanced Nonstationary Data Stream Classification

In real-world applications, the process generating the data might suffer from nonstationary effects (e.g., due to seasonality, faults affecting sensors or actuators, and changes in the users' behaviour). These changes, often called concept drift, might induce severe (potentially catastrophic) impacts on trained learning models that become obsolete over time, and inadequate to solve the task at hand. Learning in presence of concept drift aims at designing machine and deep learning models that are able to track and adapt to concept drift. Typically, techniques to handle concept drift are either active or passive, and traditionally, these have been considered to be mutually exclusive. Active techniques use an explicit drift detection mechanism, and re-train the learning algorithm when concept drift is detected. Passive techniques use an implicit method to deal with drift, and continually update the model using incremental learning. Differently from what present in the literature, we propose a hybrid alternative which merges the two approaches, hence, leveraging on their advantages. The proposed method called Hybrid-Adaptive REBAlancing (HAREBA) significantly outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods in terms of learning quality and speed; we experiment how it is effective under severe class imbalance levels too.

Nonstationary data stream classification with online active learning and siamese neural networks

We have witnessed in recent years an ever-growing volume of information becoming available in a streaming manner in various application areas. As a result, there is an emerging need for online learning methods that train predictive models on-the-fly. A series of open challenges, however, hinder their deployment in practice. These are, learning as data arrive in real-time one-by-one, learning from data with limited ground truth information, learning from nonstationary data, and learning from severely imbalanced data, while occupying a limited amount of memory for data storage. We propose the ActiSiamese algorithm, which addresses these challenges by combining online active learning, siamese networks, and a multi-queue memory. It develops a new density-based active learning strategy which considers similarity in the latent (rather than the input) space. We conduct an extensive study that compares the role of different active learning budgets and strategies, the performance with/without memory, the performance with/without ensembling, in both synthetic and real-world datasets, under different data nonstationarity characteristics and class imbalance levels. ActiSiamese outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art algorithms, and is effective under severe imbalance, even only when a fraction of the arriving instances' labels is available. We publicly release our code to the community.

A Multi-label Time Series Classification Approach for Non-intrusive Water End-Use Monitoring

Numerous real-world problems from a diverse set of application areas exist that exhibit temporal dependencies. We focus on a specific type of time series classification which we refer to as aggregated time series classification. We consider an aggregated sequence of a multi-variate time series, and propose a methodology to make predictions based solely on the aggregated information. As a case study, we apply our methodology to the challenging problem of household water end-use dissagregation when using non-intrusive water monitoring. Our methodology does not require a-priori identification of events, and to our knowledge, it is considered for the first time. We conduct an extensive experimental study using a residential water-use simulator, involving different machine learning classifiers, multi-label classification methods, and successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology.

Data-efficient Online Classification with Siamese Networks and Active Learning

An ever increasing volume of data is nowadays becoming available in a streaming manner in many application areas, such as, in critical infrastructure systems, finance and banking, security and crime and web analytics. To meet this new demand, predictive models need to be built online where learning occurs on-the-fly. Online learning poses important challenges that affect the deployment of online classification systems to real-life problems. In this paper we investigate learning from limited labelled, nonstationary and imbalanced data in online classification. We propose a learning method that synergistically combines siamese neural networks and active learning. The proposed method uses a multi-sliding window approach to store data, and maintains separate and balanced queues for each class. Our study shows that the proposed method is robust to data nonstationarity and imbalance, and significantly outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both learning speed and performance. Importantly, it is effective even when only 1% of the labels of the arriving instances are available.