Concept Drift Detection with Hierarchical Hypothesis Testing

When using statistical models (such as a classifier) in a streaming environment, there is often a need to detect and adapt to concept drifts to mitigate any deterioration in the model’s predictive performance over time. Unfortunately, the ability of popular concept drift approaches in detecting these drifts in the relationship of the response and predictor variable is often dependent on the distribution characteristics of the data streams, as well as its sensitivity on parameter tuning. This paper presents Hierarchical Linear Four Rates (HLFR), a framework that detects concept drifts for different data stream distributions (including imbalanced data) by leveraging a hierarchical set of hypothesis tests in an online setting. The performance of HLFR is compared to benchmark approaches using both simulated and real-world datasets spanning the breadth of concept drift types. HLFR significantly outperforms benchmark approaches in terms of accuracy, G-mean, recall, delay in detection and adaptability across the various datasets.