Opt-AEDDM: toward optimizing autoencoders for effective concept drift detection
Faculty / School
School of Mathematics and Computer Science (SMCS)
Department
Department of Computer Science
Was this content written or created while at IBA?
Yes
Document Type
Article
Source Publication
Knowledge and Information Systems
ISSN
0219-3116
Keywords
Concept drift, Machine learning, Autoencoders, Variational Autoencoders, Hyperparameters, Optimization
Disciplines
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Data Science | Other Computer Sciences
Abstract
The occurrence of concept drift is an important phenomenon in an operational scenario related to machine learning-based system which affects the performance of pre-trained models. To maintain the integrity and confidence in predictions, an effective drift detection and adaptation mechanism is a vital component in these operational systems. Apart from different supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised drift detection techniques, recently the research trend has been focused more on deep learning-based methods specifically based on autoencoders. A hallmark of autoencoders is their versatility. Different types and implementations exist, each specializing in handling specific tasks. In case of drift detection, the focus is to learn the data distribution using autoencoder and to measure the deviation of the newly arriving data in terms of reconstruction loss. While standard or vanilla autoencoders are the most used; other variations also exist and can be evaluated for better drift detection performance. Apart from the type of the autoencoder, another important consideration is the use of right set of parameters and hyperparameters for an autoencoder-based drift detection mechanism. In this paper, we provide a framework to optimize the performance of autoencoder-based drift detection methods. We provide a theoretical and an empirical evaluation of other applicable types of autoencoders including denoising, variational and standard, followed by a detailed mechanism for selecting the best hyperparameters using grid search and selection of drift detection method’s specific parameters using both grid search and Bayesian optimization (BO). For experimentation, we have used AEDDM (autoencoder-based drift detection method) as the base drift detection method to produce Opt-AEDDM—the optimized version of AEDDM. Detailed experiments on four synthetic (Hyperplane, Gaussian, VD and RBF) and four real-world datasets (NOAA, ELEC2, KDDCUP99 and Forest Covertype) prove the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed framework in finding the best autoencoder with best set of hyperparameters and parameters with improved drift detection performance.
Indexing Information
HJRS - W Category, Scopus, Web of Science - Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI)
Journal Quality Ranking
3.1, Q2, Indexed
Recommended Citation
Ali, U., & Mahmood, T. (2026). Opt-AEDDM: toward optimizing autoencoders for effective concept drift detection. Knowledge and Information Systems, 68 (1), 1-77. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/faculty-research-articles/254
Publication Status
Published
Rights Information
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
