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Unsupervised concept drift detection using a student–teacher approach

Abstract
Concept drift detection is a crucial task in data stream evolving environments. Most of state of the art approaches designed to tackle this problem monitor the loss of predictive models. However, this approach falls short in many real-world scenarios, where the true labels are not readily available to compute the loss. In this context, there is increasing attention to approaches that perform concept drift detection in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without access to the true labels after the model is deployed. We propose a novel approach to unsupervised concept drift detection based on a student-teacher learning paradigm. Essentially, we create an auxiliary model (student) to mimic the primary model’s behaviour (teacher). At run-time, our approach is to use the teacher for predicting new instances and monitoring the mimicking loss of the student for concept drift detection. In a set of experiments using 19 data streams, we show that the proposed approach can detect concept drift and present a competitive behaviour relative to the state of the art approaches.
Type
Journal Article
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Citation
Date
2022-01-01
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Rights
This is an author’s accepted version of an article published in Machine Learning. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022.