Beyond Adaptation: Understanding Distributional Changes (Dagstuhl Seminar 20372)

Abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 20372 "Beyond Adaptation: Understanding Distributional Changes". It was centered around the aim to establish a better understanding of the causes, nature and consequences of distributional changes. Four key research questions were identified and discussed in during the seminar. These were the practical relevance of different scenarios and types of change, the modelling of change, the detection and measuring of change, and the adaptation to change.
The seminar brought together participants from several distinct communities in which parts of these questions are already studied, albeit in separate lines of research. These included data stream mining, where the focus is on concept drift detection and adaptation, transfer learning and domain adaptation in machine learning and algorithmic learning theory, change point detection in statistics, and the evolving and adaptive systems community. Therefore, this seminar contributed to stimulate research towards a thorough understanding of distributional changes.