A novel meta-cognitive-based scaffolding classifier to sequential non-stationary classification problems

A novel meta-cognitive-based scaffolding classifier, namely Generic-Classifier (gClass), is proposed in this paper to handle non-stationary classification problems in the single-pass learning mode. Meta-cognitive learning is a breakthrough in the machine learning where the learning process is not only directed to craft learning strategies to exacerbate the classification rates, i.e., how-to-leam aspect, but also is focused to accommodate the emotional reasoning and commonsense of human being in terms of what-to-leam and when-to-learn facets. The crux of gClass is to synergize the scaffolding learning concept, which constitutes a well-known tutoring theory in the psychological literatures, in the how-to-learn context of meta-cognitive learning, in order to boost the learner's performance in dealing with complex data. A comprehensive empirical studies in time-varying datasets is carried out, where gClass numerical results are benchmarked with other state-of-the-art classifiers. gClass is, generally speaking, capable of delivering the most encouraging numerical results where a trade-off between predictive accuracy and classifier's complexity can be achieved.