Analysis of Drifting Features

Abstract: The notion of concept drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. We are interested in an identification of those features, that are most relevant for the observed drift. We distinguish between drift inducing features, for which the observed feature drift cannot be explained by any other feature, and faithfully drifting features, which correlate with the present drift of other features. This notion gives rise to minimal subsets of the feature space, which are able to characterize the observed drift as a whole. We relate this problem to the problems of feature selection and feature relevance learning, which allows us to derive a detection algorithm. We demonstrate its usefulness on different benchmarks.