Concept Drift Awareness in Twitter Streams

Abstract

Learning in non-stationary environments is not an easy task and requires a distinctive approach. The learning model must not only have the ability to continuously learn, but also the ability to acquired new concepts and forget the old ones. Additionally, given the significant importance that social networks gained as information networks, there is an ever-growing interest in the extraction of complex information used for trend detection, promoting services or market sensing. This dynamic nature tends to limit the performance of traditional static learning models and dynamic learning strategies must be put forward. In this paper we present a learning strategy to learn with drift in the occurrence of concepts in Twitter. We propose three different models: a time-window model, an ensemble-based model and an incremental model. Since little is known about the types of drift that can occur in Twitter, we simulate different types of drift by artificially time stamping real Twitter messages in order to evaluate and validate our strategy. Results are so far encouraging regarding learning in the presence of drift, along with classifying messages in Twitter streams. © 2014 IEEE.