Mining Recurring Concept Drifts with Limited Labeled Streaming Data

Tracking recurring concept drifts is a significant issue for machine learning and data mining that frequently appears in real-world stream classification problems. It is a challenge for many streaming classification algorithms to learn recurring concepts in a data stream environment with unlabeled data, and this challenge has received little attention from the research community. Motivated by this challenge, this article focuses on the problem of recurring contexts in streaming environments with limited labeled data. We propose a semi-supervised classification algorithm for data streams with REcurring concept Drifts and Limited LAbeled data, called REDLLA, in which a decision tree is adopted as the classification model. When growing a tree, a clustering algorithm based on k-means is installed to produce concept clusters and unlabeled data are labeled in the method of majority-class at leaves. In view of deviations between history and new concept clusters, potential concept drifts are distinguished and recurring concepts are maintained. Extensive studies on both synthetic and real-world data confirm the advantages of our REDLLA algorithm over three state-of-the-art online classification algorithms of CVFDT, DWCDS, and CDRDT and several known online semi-supervised algorithms, even in the case with more than 90% unlabeled data.