Basic Evaluation Scenarios for Incrementally Trained Classifiers

Evaluation of incremental classification algorithms is a complex task because there are many aspects to evaluate. Besides the aspects such as accuracy and generalization that are usually evaluated in the context of classification, we also need to assess how the algorithm handles two main challenges of the incremental learning: the concept drift and the catastrophic forgetting. However, only catastrophic forgetting is evaluated by the current methodology, where the classifier is evaluated in two scenarios for class addition and expansion. We generalize the methodology by proposing two new scenarios of incremental learning for class inclusion and separation that evaluate the handling of the concept drift. We demonstrate the proposed methodology on the evaluation of three different incremental classifiers, where we show that the proposed methodology provides a more complete and finer evaluation.