Pitfalls of Unlabeled Disagreement-Based Drift Detection in Streaming Tree Ensembles

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Neves, Lara Sá, Lourenço, Afonso, John, Lizy K., Marreiros, Goreti
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Neves, Lara Sá
Lourenço, Afonso
John, Lizy K.
Marreiros, Goreti
author_facet Neves, Lara Sá
Lourenço, Afonso
John, Lizy K.
Marreiros, Goreti
contents Detecting concept drift in high-speed data streams remains challenging, particularly when models must operate on unlabeled data and avoid false alarms caused by benign shifts. While disagreement-based uncertainty has shown promise in neural networks, its adaptation to ensembles of incremental decision trees (IDTs) remains largely unexplored. We investigate this approach by constructing batch-specific disagreement measures via label flipping in ensemble members and evaluating their effectiveness for drift detection in tabular data streams. Our experiments show that, although this method performs well in ensembles of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), it consistently underperforms loss-based detectors when applied to IDTs. We attribute this behavior to the intrinsic rigidity of IDTs: learning primarily through structural expansion, with limited parameter adaptation, restricts model plasticity and prevents disagreement from reliably reflecting learning potential. Recent work on restructuring IDTs using their intrinsic decomposition into non-overlapping rules offers a promising direction for improving adaptability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12803
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pitfalls of Unlabeled Disagreement-Based Drift Detection in Streaming Tree Ensembles
Neves, Lara Sá
Lourenço, Afonso
John, Lizy K.
Marreiros, Goreti
Machine Learning
Detecting concept drift in high-speed data streams remains challenging, particularly when models must operate on unlabeled data and avoid false alarms caused by benign shifts. While disagreement-based uncertainty has shown promise in neural networks, its adaptation to ensembles of incremental decision trees (IDTs) remains largely unexplored. We investigate this approach by constructing batch-specific disagreement measures via label flipping in ensemble members and evaluating their effectiveness for drift detection in tabular data streams. Our experiments show that, although this method performs well in ensembles of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), it consistently underperforms loss-based detectors when applied to IDTs. We attribute this behavior to the intrinsic rigidity of IDTs: learning primarily through structural expansion, with limited parameter adaptation, restricts model plasticity and prevents disagreement from reliably reflecting learning potential. Recent work on restructuring IDTs using their intrinsic decomposition into non-overlapping rules offers a promising direction for improving adaptability.
title Pitfalls of Unlabeled Disagreement-Based Drift Detection in Streaming Tree Ensembles
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12803