Neural networks in geophysical applications

Neural networks are increasingly popular in geophysics. Because they are universal approximators, these tools can approximate any continuous function with an arbitrary precision. Hence, they may yield important contributions to finding solutions to a variety of geophysical applications. However, knowledge of many methods and techniques recently developed to increase the performance and to facilitate the use of neural networks does not seem to be widespread in the geophysical community. Therefore, the power of these tools has not yet been explored to their full extent. In this paper, techniques are described for faster training, better overall performance, i.e., generalization,and the automatic estimation of network size and architecture

A Novel Progressive Multi-label Classifier for Classincremental Data

In this paper, a progressive learning algorithm for multi-label classification to learn new labels while retaining the knowledge of previous labels is designed. New output neurons corresponding to new labels are added and the neural network connections and parameters are automatically restructured as if the label has been introduced from the beginning. This work is the first of the kind in multi-label classifier for class-incremental learning. It is useful for real-world applications such as robotics where streaming data are available and the number of labels is often unknown. Based on the Extreme Learning Machine framework, a novel universal classifier with plug and play capabilities for progressive multi-label classification is developed. Experimental results on various benchmark synthetic and real datasets validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

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

Extreme learning machine (ELM) as an emerging branch of shallow networks has shown its excellent generalization and fast learning speed. However, for blended data, the robustness of ELM is weak because its weights and biases of hidden nodes are set randomly. Moreover, 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 groups concurrently, then employs selective ensemble 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 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 results have shown that RMSE-ELM significantly improves robustness with slightly computational time compared with 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.Comment: Accepted for publication in Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 09/22/201

Comparing error minimized extreme learning machines and support vector sequential feed-forward neural networks

Recently, error minimized extreme learning machines (EM-ELMs) have been proposed as a simple and efficient approach to build single-hidden-layer feed-forward networks (SLFNs) sequentially. They add random hidden nodes one by one (or group by group) and update the output weights incrementally to minimize the sum-of-squares error in the training set. Other very similar methods that also construct SLFNs sequentially had been reported earlier with the main difference that their hidden-layer weights are a subset of the data instead of being random. By analogy with the concept of support vectors original of support vector machines (SVMs), these approaches can be referred to as support vector sequential feed-forward neural networks (SV-SFNNs), and they are a particular case of the Sequential Approximation with Optimal Coefficients and Interacting Frequencies (SAOCIF) method. In this paper, it is firstly shown that EM-ELMs can also be cast as a particular case of SAOCIF. In particular, EM-ELMs can easily be extended to test some number of random candidates at each step and select the best of them, as SAOCIF does. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the cost of the calculation of the optimal output-layer weights in the originally proposed EM-ELMs can be improved if it is replaced by the one included in SAOCIF. Secondly, we present the results of an experimental study on 10 benchmark classification and 10 benchmark regression data sets, comparing EM-ELMs and SV-SFNNs, that was carried out under the same conditions for the two models. Although both models have the same (efficient) computational cost, a statistically significant improvement in generalization performance of SV-SFNNs vs. EM-ELMs was found in 12 out of the 20 benchmark problems.Postprint (published version