Automated Machine Learning Techniques for Data Streams
This addresses the challenge of applying AutoML to streaming data for industries like IoT and web analytics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tools and methods.
The paper surveyed existing AutoML tools on data streams, revealing that while they perform well initially, concept drift necessitates detection or adaptation techniques to maintain accuracy over time.
Automated machine learning techniques benefited from tremendous research progress in recently. These developments and the continuous-growing demand for machine learning experts led to the development of numerous AutoML tools. However, these tools assume that the entire training dataset is available upfront and that the underlying distribution does not change over time. These assumptions do not hold in a data stream mining setting where an unbounded stream of data cannot be stored and is likely to manifest concept drift. Industry applications of machine learning on streaming data become more popular due to the increasing adoption of real-time streaming patterns in IoT, microservices architectures, web analytics, and other fields. The research summarized in this paper surveys the state-of-the-art open-source AutoML tools, applies them to data collected from streams, and measures how their performance changes over time. For comparative purposes, batch, batch incremental and instance incremental estimators are applied and compared. Moreover, a meta-learning technique for online algorithm selection based on meta-feature extraction is proposed and compared while model replacement and continual AutoML techniques are discussed. The results show that off-the-shelf AutoML tools can provide satisfactory results but in the presence of concept drift, detection or adaptation techniques have to be applied to maintain the predictive accuracy over time.