Enhancing classification on multi-class drifting data streams with one-vs-rest strategies
摘要
Dynamic environments pose challenges for machine learning models due to concept drift, where data distributions change over time and may affect specific classes locally or globally. We propose One-vs-Rest Drift-Aware (OvR-DA), a framework that integrates the classical one-vs-rest decomposition with a class-informed drift detection method to enable targeted adaptation. OvR-DA monitors class-specific distributions and, upon detecting drift, selectively replaces only the affected sub-classifiers rather than retraining the entire model. This approach ensures rapid recovery and efficient handling of multi-class data streams under diverse drift scenarios while maintaining overall predictive performance. Through comprehensive experimentation and comparisons with six state-of-the-art classifiers and various One-Vs-Rest strategy variations, the proposed OvR-DA classifier consistently outperformed all non-ensemble methods and achieved competitive results with ensemble models. These findings confirm the effectiveness of OvR-DA in handling multi-class scenarios involving both local and global concept drifts. All experiments, code, and datasets are publicly accessible at https://github.com/gabrieljaguiar/multi-class-stream.