RMSE-ELM: Recursive Model Based Selective Ensemble of Extreme Learning Machines for Robustness Improvement

For blended data, the robustness of extreme learning machine (ELM) is so weak because the coefficients (weights and biases) of hidden nodes are set randomly and the noisy data exert a negative effect. To solve this problem, a new framework called “RMSE-ELM” is proposed in this paper. It is a two-layer recursive model. In the first layer, the framework trains lots of ELMs in different ensemble groups concurrently and then employs selective ensemble approach to pick out an optimal set of ELMs in each group, which can be merged into a large group of ELMs called candidate pool. In the second layer, selective ensemble approach is recursively used on candidate pool to acquire the final ensemble. In the experiments, we apply UCI blended datasets to confirm the robustness of our new approach in two key aspects (mean square error and standard deviation). The space complexity of our method is increased to some degree, but the result has shown that RMSE-ELM significantly improves robustness with a rapid learning speed compared to representative methods (ELM, OP-ELM, GASEN-ELM, GASEN-BP, and E-GASEN). It becomes a potential framework to solve robustness issue of ELM for high-dimensional blended data in the future.