Abstract¶
Ubiquitous data poses challenges on current machine learning systems to store, handle and analyze data at scale. Traditionally, this task is tackled by dividing the data into (large) batches. Models are trained on a data batch and then used to obtain predictions. As new data becomes available, new models are created which may contain previous data or not. This training-testing cycle is repeated continuously. Stream learning is an active field where the goal is to learn from infinite data streams. This gives rise to additional challenges to those found in the traditional batch setting: First, data is not stored (it is infinite), thus models are exposed only once to single samples of the data, and once processed those samples are not seen again. Models shall be ready to provide predictions at any time. Compute resources such as memory and time are limited, consequently, they shall be carefully managed. The data can drift over time and models shall be able to adapt accordingly. This is a key difference with respect to batch learning, where data is assumed static and models will fail in the presence of change. Model degradation is a side-effect of batch learning in many real-world applications requiring additional efforts to address it. This papers provides a brief overview of the core concepts of machine learning for data streams and describes scikit-multiflow, an open-source Python library specifically created for machine learning on data streams. scikit-multiflow is built to serve two main purposes: easy to design and run experiments, easy to extend and modify existing methods.
