An Experimental Analysis of Drift Detection Methods on Multi-Class Imbalanced Data Streams

Featured Application The industrial sensor-based application generates continuous non-stationary data streams which change over time. By analyzing the performance of existing change detection methods, the selection of the best performing method can be achieved for application in an industrial environment to early detect the fault or unusual change and to reduce the maintenance cost. The performance of machine learning models diminishes while predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the equipment or fault prediction due to the issue of concept drift. This issue is aggravated when the problem setting comprises multi-class imbalanced data. The existing drift detection methods are designed to detect certain drifts in specific scenarios. For example, the drift detector designed for binary class data may not produce satisfactory results for applications that generate multi-class data. Similarly, the drift detection method designed for the detection of sudden drift may struggle with detecting incremental drift. Therefore, in this experimental investigation, we seek to investigate the performance of the existing drift detection methods on multi-class imbalanced data streams with different drift types. For this reason, this study simulated the streams with various forms of concept drift and the multi-class imbalance problem to test the existing drift detection methods. The findings of current study will aid in the selection of drift detection methods for use in developing solutions for real-time industrial applications that encounter similar issues. The results revealed that among the compared methods, DDM produced the best average F1 score. The results also indicate that the multi-class imbalance causes the false alarm rate to increase for most of the drift detection methods.