MINAS: multiclass learning algorithm for novelty detection in data streams

Data stream mining is an emergent research area that aims at extracting knowledge from large amounts of continuously generated data. Novelty detection (ND) is a classification task that assesses if one or a set of examples differ significantly from the previously seen examples. This is an important task for data stream, as new concepts may appear, disappear or evolve over time. Most of the works found in the ND literature presents it as a binary classification task. In several data stream real life problems, ND must be treated as a multiclass task, in which, the known concept is composed by one or more classes and different new classes may appear. This work proposes MINAS, an algorithm for ND in data streams. MINAS deals with ND as a multiclass task. In the initial training phase, MINAS builds a decision model based on a labeled data set. In the online phase, new examples are classified using this model, or marked as unknown. Groups of unknown examples can be used later to create valid novelty patterns (NP), which are added to the current model. The decision model is updated as new data come over the stream in order to reflect changes in the known classes and allow the addition of NP. This work also presents a set of experiments carried out comparing MINAS and the main novelty detection algorithms found in the literature, using artificial and real data sets. The experimental results show the potential of the proposed algorithm.