Adaptive Learning in Imbalanced Data Streams With Unpredictable Feature Evolution
Jiahang Tu, Xijia Tang, Shilin Gu, Yucong Dai, Ruidong Fan, Chenping Hou · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · 2025
Learning from data streams collected sequentially over time are widely spread in real-world applications. Previous methods typically assume that the data stream has a feature space with a fixed or clearly defined evolution pattern, as well as a balanced class distribution. However, in many practical scenarios, such as environmental monitoring systems, the frequency of anomalous events is significantly imbalanced compared to normal ones and the feature space dynamically changes due to ecological evolution and sensor lifespan. To alleviate this important but rarely studied problem, we propose the Adaptive Learning in Imbalace data streams with Unpredictable feature evolution (ALIU) algorithm. As data streams with imbalanced class distribution arrive, ALIU first mitigates the model's bias for the majority class by reweighting the adaptive gradient descent magnitudes between different classes. Then, a new loss function is proposed that simultaneously focuses on misclassifications and maintains model robustness. Further, when imbalanced data streams arrive with feature evolutions, we reuse the previously learned model and update the incomplete and augmented features by adopting the adaptive gradient strategy and ensemble method, respectively. Finally, we utilize the projected technique to build a sparse yet efficient model. Based on a few common and mild assumptions, we theoretically analyze that the ALIU satisfies a sub-linear regret bound under both convex and strong convex loss functions and the performance of model can be improved with the assistance of old features. Besides, extensive experimental results further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.