In this paper, we present a method for exploratory data analysis of streaming data based on probabilistic graphical models (latent variable models). This method is illustrated by concept drift tracking, using financial client data from a European regional bank. For this particular setting, the anal yzed data spans the period from April 2007 to March 2014 and therefore starts before the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008. The implied changes in the economic climate during this period manifests itself as concept drift in the underlying data generating distribution. We explore and analyze this financial client data using a probabilistic graphical modeling framework that provides an explicit representation of concept drift as an integral part of the model. We show how learning these types of models from data provides additional insight into the hidden mechanisms governing the drift in the domain. We present an iterative approach for identifying disparate factors that jointly account for the drift in the domain. This includes a semantic characterization of one of the main influencing drift factors. Based on the experiences and results obtained from analyzing the financial data, we discuss the applicability of the framework within a more general context.

Making inferences from data streams is a pervasive problem in many modern data analysis applications. But it requires to address the problem of continuous model updating, and adapt to changes or drifts in the underlying data generating distribution. In this paper, we approach these problems from a Bayesian perspective covering general conjugate exponential models. Our proposal makes use of non-conjugate hierarchical priors to explicitly model temporal changes of the model parameters. We also derive a novel variational inference scheme which overcomes the use of non-conjugate priors while maintaining the computational efficiency of variational methods over conjugate models. The approach is validated on three real data sets over three latent variable models.

In this paper we propose a method for scaling up filter-based feature selection in classification problems. We use the conditional mutual information as filter measure and show how the required statistics can be computed in parallel avoiding unnecessary calculations. The distribution of the calculations between the available computing units is determined based on balanced incomplete block designs, a strategy first developed within the area of statistical design of experiments. We show the scalability of our method through a series of experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.