Using Domain Adaptation for Incremental SVM Classification of Drift Data

A common assumption in machine learning is that training data is complete, and the data distribution is fixed. However, in many practical applications, this assumption does not hold. Incremental learning was proposed to compensate for this problem. Common approaches include retraining models and incremental learning to compensate for the shortage of training data. Retraining models is time-consuming and computationally expensive, while incremental learning can save time and computational costs. However, the concept drift may affect the performance. Two crucial issues should be considered to address concept drift in incremental learning: gaining new knowledge without forgetting previously acquired knowledge and forgetting obsolete information without corrupting valid information. This paper proposes an incremental support vector machine learning approach with domain adaptation, considering both crucial issues. Firstly, a small amount of new data is used to fine-tune the previous model to generate a model that is sensitive to the new data but retains the previous data information by transferring parameters. Secondly, an ensemble and model selection mechanism based on Bayesian theory is proposed to keep the valid information. The computational experiments indicate that the performance of the proposed model improved as new data was acquired. In addition, the influence of the degree of data drift on the algorithm is also explored. A gain in performance on four out of five industrial datasets and four synthetic datasets has been demonstrated over the support vector machine and incremental support vector machine algorithms.