Data Stream Mining and Analysis : Clustering Evolving Data

Abstract: Streaming data is becoming more prevalent in our society every day. With the increasing use of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks, the number of possible data sources steadily increases. Therefore, there is a need to develop algorithms that can handle the massive amount of data we now generate.Data stream mining is a sub-domain of data mining where data is mined to gain an understanding of its underlying structure. When we move to streaming data, restrictions are imposed on the algorithms that can be used. Data streams are possibly endless, and their instances arrive rapidly, can often only be processed once or a few times, and often evolve as the data is generated over time.This thesis explores data-driven techniques to model and analyze evolving data streams. We focus on slower data streams where incremental updates are not necessary, and the interest lies in analyzing its behavior over longer time periods. We aim to evaluate existing and develop novel algorithms and techniques suitable for analyzing these types of data streams. We use both supervised and unsupervised learning methods to model the user/system behaviors, and the methods and algorithms are evaluated on various datasets.Specifically, we investigate regression and clustering algorithms to mine streaming data for user/system behavior patterns. We also design an algorithm capable of modeling user/system behavior in a single evolving data stream, which is easy to use and capitalizes on prior knowledge from the history of the stream. Furthermore, we design a clustering algorithm that takes advantage of multiple data streams, where each stream represents a part of the entire system, to model various aspects of the user/system behavior. Finally, we review the current state-of-the-art methods for evaluating data stream clustering algorithms and identify aspects that should be considered for the future.