•This method not only makes a preliminary division of concept drift, but also gives a more detailed classification.•It can provide more accurate guidance for rapid model updating after a concept drift occurs. Concept drift is a common and important issue in streaming data analysis and mining. Thus far, many concept drift detection methods have been proposed but may not be able to identify the type of concept drift, which will result in some difficulties, such as extracting the wrong key information, inadequate model learning and poor detection efficiency. To solve these problems, a concept drift type identification method is proposed based on multi-sliding windows (CDT_MSW). This method consists of three processes. During the first detection process, the drift position is detected by sliding the basic window forward. Then, in the growth process, the drift length is detected using the growth of the adjoint window, and the drift category is identified according to the drift length. Finally, during tracking process, the drift subcategory can be accurately identified according to the different tracking flow ratio curves generated during window tracking. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively identify the type of concept drift, accurately analyze the key information during online learning and improve the efficiency and generalization performance of streaming data analysis and mining.