A2D2: A pre-event abrupt drift detection

Most drift detection mechanisms designed for classification problems works in a post-event manner: after receiving the data set completely (patterns and class labels of the train and test set), they apply a sequence of procedures to identify some change in the class-conditional distribution - a concept drift. However, detecting changes after its occurrence can be in some situations harmful for the process under supervision. This paper proposes a pre-event approach for abrupt drift detection, called by A2D2. Briefly, this method is composed of three steps: (i) label the patterns from the test set, using an unsupervised method; (ii) compute some statistics from the train and test set, conditioned on the given class labels; and (iii) compare the train and test statistics using a multivariate hypothesis test. Also, it has been proposed a procedure for creating datasets with abrupt drift. This procedure was used in the sensivity analysis of A2D2, in order to understand the influence degree of each parameter on its final performance.