Stacked Extreme Learning Machines

Abstract

Extreme learning machine (ELM) has recently attracted many researchers' interest due to its very fast learning speed, good generalization ability, and ease of implementation. It provides a unified solution that can be used directly to solve regression, binary, and multiclass classification problems. In this paper, we propose a stacked ELMs (S-ELMs) that is specially designed for solving large and complex data problems. The S-ELMs divides a single large ELM network into multiple stacked small ELMs which are serially connected. The S-ELMs can approximate a very large ELM network with small memory requirement. To further improve the testing accuracy on big data problems, the ELM autoencoder can be implemented during each iteration of the S-ELMs algorithm. The simulation results show that the S-ELMs even with random hidden nodes can achieve similar testing accuracy to support vector machine (SVM) while having low memory requirements. With the help of ELM autoencoder, the S-ELMs can achieve much better testing accuracy than SVM and slightly better accuracy than deep belief network (DBN) with much faster training speed.