An incremental fuzzy decision tree classification method for mining data streams

One of most important algorithms for mining data streams is VFDT. It uses Hoeffding inequality to achieve a probabilistic bound on the accuracy of the tree constructed. Gama et al. have extended VFDT in two directions. Their system VFDTc can deal with continuous data and use more powerful classification techniques at tree leaves. In this paper, we revisit this problem and implemented a system fVFDT on top of VFDT and VFDTc. We make the following four contributions: 1) we present a threaded binary search trees (TBST) approach for efficiently handling continuous attributes. It builds a threaded binary search tree, and its processing time for values inserting is O(nlogn), while VFDT's processing time is O(n(2)). When a new example arrives, VFDTc need update O(logn) attribute tree nodes, but fVFDT just need update one necessary node.2) we improve the method of getting the best split-test point of a given continuous attribute. Comparing to the method used in VFDTc, it improves from O(nlogn) to O (n) in processing time. 3) Comparing to VFDTc, fVFDT's candidate split-test number decrease from O(n) to O(logn).4)lmprove the soft discretization method to be used in data streams mining, it overcomes the problem of noise data and improve the classification accuracy.