Improvised methods for tackling big data stream mining challenges: case study of human activity recognition

Big data stream is a new hype but a practical computational challenge founded on data streams that are prevalent in applications nowadays. It is quite well known that data streams that are originated and collected from monitoring sensors accumulate continuously to a very huge amount making traditional batch-based model induction algorithms infeasible for real-time data mining or just-in-time data analytics. In this position paper, following a new data stream mining methodology, namely stream-based holistic analytics and reasoning in parallel (SHARP), a list of data analytic challenges as well as improvised methods are looked into. In particular, two types of decision tree algorithms, batch-mode and incremental-mode, are put under test at sensor data that represents a typical big data stream. We investigate whether and to what extent of two improvised methods—outlier removal and balancing imbalanced class distributions—affect the prediction performance in big data stream mining. SHARP is founded on incremental learning which does not require all the training to be loaded into the memory. This important fundamental concept needs to be supported not only by the decision tree algorithms, but by the other improvised methods usually at the preprocessing stage as well. This paper sheds some light into this area which is often overlooked by data analysts when it comes to big data stream mining.