US Patent 7565369 System and method for mining time-changing data streams

A general framework for mining concept-drifting data streams using weighted ensemble classifiers. An ensemble of classification models, such as C4.5, RIPPER, naive Bayesian, etc., is trained from sequential chunks of the data stream. The classifiers in the ensemble are judiciously weighted based on their expected classification accuracy on the test data under the time-evolving environment. Thus, the ensemble approach improves both the efficiency in learning the model and the accuracy in performing classification. An empirical study shows that the proposed methods have substantial advantage over single-classifier approaches in prediction accuracy, and the ensemble framework is effective for a variety of classification models.