  Classifiers trained on data sets possessing an imbalanced class distribution
are known to exhibit poor generalisation performance. This is known as the
imbalanced learning problem. The problem becomes particularly acute when we
consider incremental classifiers operating on imbalanced data streams,
especially when the learning objective is rare class identification. As
accuracy may provide a misleading impression of performance on imbalanced data,
existing stream classifiers based on accuracy can suffer poor minority class
performance on imbalanced streams, with the result being low minority class
recall rates. In this paper we address this deficiency by proposing the use of
the Hellinger distance measure, as a very fast decision tree split criterion.
We demonstrate that by using Hellinger a statistically significant improvement
in recall rates on imbalanced data streams can be achieved, with an acceptable
increase in the false positive rate.
