One of the current challenges in machine learning is how to deal with data coming at increasing rates in data streams. New predictive learning strategies are needed to cope with the high throughput data and concept drift. One of the data stream mining tasks where new learning strategies are needed is multi-target regression, due to its applicability in a high number of real world problems. While reliable and effective learning strategies have been proposed for batch multi-target regression, few have been proposed for multi-target online learning in data streams. Besides, the existing solutions do not consider the occurrence of inter-target correlations when making predictions. In this work, we propose an online learning strategy for multi-target regression in data streams. The proposed strategy extends a single target decision tree online learning algorithm to allow multi-target online regression learning in data streams. For such, the proposed strategy, called Stacked Single-target Hoeffding Tree (SST-HT), uses the inter-target dependencies as an additional information source to enhance predictive accuracy. Throughout an extensive experimental setup, we evaluate our proposal against state-of-the-art decision tree-based algorithms for online multi-target regression. According to the experimental results, SST-HT presents superior predictive accuracy, with a small increase in the processing time and memory requirements.
@cite_9: The problem of real-time extraction of meaningful patterns from time-changing data streams is of increasing importance for the machine learning and data mining communities. Regression in time-changing data streams is a relatively unexplored topic, despite the apparent applications. This paper proposes an efficient and incremental stream mining algorithm which is able to learn regression and model trees from possibly unbounded, high-speed and time-changing data streams. The algorithm is evaluated extensively in a variety of settings involving artificial and real data. To the best of our knowledge there is no other general purpose algorithm for incremental learning regression model trees able to perform explicit change detection and informed adaptation. The algorithm performs online and in real-time, observes each example only once at the speed of arrival, and maintains at any-time a ready-to-use model tree. The tree leaves contain linear models induced online from the examples assigned to them, a process with low complexity. The algorithm has mechanisms for drift detection and model adaptation, which enable it to maintain accurate and updated regression models at any time. The drift detection mechanism exploits the structure of the tree in the process of local change detection. As a response to local drift, the algorithm is able to update the tree structure only locally. This approach improves the any-time performance and greatly reduces the costs of adaptation.
One of the first efforts to tackle regression problems on a online setting was made by @cite_9 . The authors proposed an online and incremental method to build regression trees and dealing with concept drift. Their proposal, called FIMT-DD (Fast Incremental Model Tree with Drift Detection), employs the Hoeffding's bound theorem to decide whether a split decision must be made very much alike the VFDT (Very Fast Decision Tree) . The authors proposed using perceptrons without activation function at the tree's leaves to provide the responses. Being one of first works to tackle regression problems on data streams, the authors mostly evaluated their approach against traditional batch regression algorithms, but their research pioneered the research on Hoeffding (Trees and Decision Rules) algorithms for STR and MTR. The FIMT-DD was only designed to deal with numerical attributes, limiting its application to nominal data, unless some data transformation technique, e.g., one hot encoding, would be applied.