The Blind Spot Paradox: When Adaptive Classifiers Defeat Drift Detectors
Abstract
Monitoring concept drift from an adaptive classifier's error stream creates an operational conflict with the model's own update loop. When internal adaptation outpaces evidence accumulation, accuracy recovers before cumulative detectors (CUSUM, Page-Hinkley) can reach threshold. Instrumenting an Adaptive Random Forest (ARF) shows that surviving trees absorb 98.6% of the post-drift error transient through incremental leaf updates alone. The first background tree swap accounts for just 0.71% of this erased error volume, but drops external detection rates by 31 percentage points. We derive the finite-horizon boundary where cumulative evidence fails to cross threshold and measure a critical magnitude floor (Δec = 0.120) below which false-alarm budgets preclude detection. This failure manifests as missed shifts on stationary streams and false-alarm flooding triggered by internal tree swaps on noisy baselines. We validate on synthetic shifts, ARMA-GARCH series (ProteuS), and tabular benchmarks (BAF, INSECTS); on the synthetic sweep at a standard threshold, the blind spot appears at Δe ≈ 0.25, showing why classical benchmarks like SEA (Δe ≤ 0.21) failed to reach it.
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BibTeX
@misc{minato2026blind,
title = {{The Blind Spot Paradox: When Adaptive Classifiers Defeat Drift Detectors}},
author = {Raphaël Minato and Fabrice Popineau and Arpad Rimmel and Bich-Liên Doan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.05853},
eprint = {2610.05853},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05853},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Blind Spot Paradox: When Adaptive Classifiers Defeat Drift Detectors
AU - Raphaël Minato
AU - Fabrice Popineau
AU - Arpad Rimmel
AU - Bich-Liên Doan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.05853
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05853
AB - Monitoring concept drift from an adaptive classifier's error stream creates an operational conflict with the model's own update loop. When internal adaptation outpaces evidence accumulation, accuracy recovers before cumulative detectors (CUSUM, Page-Hinkley) can reach threshold. Instrumenting an Adaptive Random Forest (ARF) shows that surviving trees absorb 98.6% of the post-drift error transient through incremental leaf updates alone. The first background tree swap accounts for just 0.71% of this erased error volume, but drops external detection rates by 31 percentage points. We derive the finite-horizon boundary where cumulative evidence fails to cross threshold and measure a critical magnitude floor (Δe_c = 0.120) below which false-alarm budgets preclude detection. This failure manifests as missed shifts on stationary streams and false-alarm flooding triggered by internal tree swaps on noisy baselines. We validate on synthetic shifts, ARMA-GARCH series (ProteuS), and tabular benchmarks (BAF, INSECTS); on the synthetic sweep at a standard threshold, the blind spot appears at Δe ≈ 0.25, showing why classical benchmarks like SEA (Δe ≤ 0.21) failed to reach it.
ER -