Diagnosing Concept Drift with Visual Analytics

TL;DR

This paper introduces DriftVis, a visual analytics tool that helps analysts detect, understand, and correct concept drift in streaming data, improving model accuracy through interactive analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel visual analytics approach combining drift detection with streaming scatterplots to aid understanding and correction of concept drift.

Findings

Effective detection of concept drift in real-world datasets

Enhanced understanding of drift impact on model accuracy

Support for analysts in correcting models after drift detection

Abstract

Concept drift is a phenomenon in which the distribution of a data stream changes over time in unforeseen ways, causing prediction models built on historical data to become inaccurate. While a variety of automated methods have been developed to identify when concept drift occurs, there is limited support for analysts who need to understand and correct their models when drift is detected. In this paper, we present a visual analytics method, DriftVis, to support model builders and analysts in the identification and correction of concept drift in streaming data. DriftVis combines a distribution-based drift detection method with a streaming scatterplot to support the analysis of drift caused by the distribution changes of data streams and to explore the impact of these changes on the model's accuracy. A quantitative experiment and two case studies on weather prediction and text classification have been conducted to demonstrate our proposed tool and illustrate how visual analytics can be used to support the detection, examination, and correction of concept drift.