Modern mining approaches should be able to properly deal with the increased availability of structured data. Here we focus on the problem of processing streams of trees. Specifically, we cope with classification tasks. We show that by adopting a double concept drifting reaction mechanism in the context of a kernel-based ensemble of classifiers, it is actually possible to have an effective and efficient system to process streams of trees. The original contribution consists into the introduction of a local concept drifting mechanism, specifically designed for structured data, and used to compute the ensemble score function in such a way to focus only on reliable (sub)trees belonging to the classification models which constitute the ensemble. Experimental results seem to support the relevance and usefulness of this local component for concept drifting management.

Customer segmentation is one of the most traditional and valued tasks in customer relationship management (CRM). In this article, we explore the problem in the context of the car insurance industry, where the mobility behavior of customers plays a key role: Different mobility needs, driving habits, and skills imply also different requirements (level of coverage provided by the insurance) and risks (of accidents). In the present work, we describe a methodology to extract several indicators describing the driving profile of customers, and we provide a clustering-oriented instantiation of the segmentation problem based on such indicators. Then, we consider the availability of a continuous flow of fresh mobility data sent by the circulating vehicles, aiming at keeping our segments constantly up to date. We tackle a major scalability issue that emerges in this context when the number of customers is large—namely, the communication bottleneck—by proposing and implementing a sophisticated distributed monitoring solution that reduces communications between vehicles and company servers to the essential. We validate the framework on a large database of real mobility data coming from GPS devices on private cars. Finally, we analyze the privacy risks that the proposed approach might involve for the users, providing and evaluating a countermeasure based on data perturbation.

Learning from streaming data represents an important and challenging task. Maintaining an accurate model, while the stream goes by, requires a smart way for tracking data changes through time, originating concept drift. One way to treat this kind of problem is to resort to ensemble-based techniques. In this context, the advent of new technologies related to web and ubiquitous services call for the need of new learning approaches able to deal with structured-complex information, such as trees. Kernel methods enable the modeling of structured data in learning algorithms, however they are computationally demanding. The contribute of this work is to show how an effective ensemble-based approach can be deviced for streams of trees by optimizing the kernel-based model representation. Both efficacy and efficiency of the proposed approach are assessed for different models by using data sets exhibiting different levels and types of concept drift.