Modeling Concept Drift: A Probabilistic Graphical Model Based Approach

An often used approach for detecting and adapting to concept drift when doing classification is to treat the data as i.i.d. and use changes in classification accuracy as an indication of concept drift. In this paper, we take a different perspective and propose a framework, based on probabilistic graphical models, that explicitly represents concept drift using latent variables. To ensure efficient inference and learning, we resort to a variational Bayes inference scheme. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate and analyze the proposed framework using synthetic data sets as well as a real financial data set from a Spanish bank.