Enabling Fast Lazy Learning for Data Streams

Lazy learning, such as k-nearest neighbor learning, has been widely applied to many applications. Known for well capturing data locality, lazy learning can be advantageous for highly dynamic and complex learning environments such as data streams. Yet its high memory consumption and low prediction efficiency have made it less favorable for stream oriented applications. Specifically, traditional lazy learning stores all the training data and the inductive process is deferred until a query appears, whereas in stream applications, data records flow continuously in large volumes and the prediction of class labels needs to be made in a timely manner. In this paper, we provide a systematic solution that overcomes the memory and efficiency limitations and enables fast lazy learning for concept drifting data streams. In particular, we propose a novel Lazy-tree (Ltree for short) indexing structure that dynamically maintains compact high-level summaries of historical stream records. L-trees are M-Tree [5] like, height-balanced, and can help achieve great memory consumption reduction and sub-linear time complexity for prediction. Moreover, L-trees continuously absorb new stream records and discard outdated ones, so they can naturally adapt to the dynamically changing concepts in data streams for accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data streams demonstrate the performance of our approach.