• To detect drifts in data stream when noise presents. • A novel tolerant drift detection method is designed to detect and validate. • A sparse sliding window strategy is proposed to reduce false drift detection. • Our method outperforms the existing six established drift detection methods in both accuracy and timeliness. Drift detection methods identify changes in data streams. Such changes are called concept drifts. Existing drift detection methods often assume that the input is a noise-free data stream. However, in real world applications, for example, data streams generating from internet of things are normally contaminated with noise. (noise, i.e. class noise and/or attribute noise). In this paper, we propose a Noise Tolerant Drift Detection Method (NTDDM), which is based on two-step detection and validation function to detect drifts, and filters out the false drifts caused by the noise. The NTDDM is compared with six well-known drift detection methods and tested on four benchmarks having different levels. Three performance indicators are proposed to determine whether the drift detection is made within a reasonable time, and the length of time to the known drift starting point. The comparative studies demonstrate that NTDDM outperforms the existing methods, over these performance indicators. Our proposed method has achieved a statistically significant improvement on drift detection compared to the methods in experiment. The proposed NTDDM makes it possible to efficiently and effectively detect drift in a noisy data stream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]