Fuzziness-based online sequential extreme learning machine for classification problems

The qualities of new data used in the sequential learning phase of the online sequential extreme learning machine algorithm (OS-ELM) have a significant impact on the performance of OS-ELM. This paper proposes a novel data filter mechanism for OS-ELM from the perspective of fuzziness and a fuzziness-based online sequential extreme learning machine algorithm (FOS-ELM). In FOS-ELM, when new data arrive, a fuzzy classifier first picks out the meaningful data according to the fuzziness of each sample. Specifically, the new samples with high-output fuzziness are selected and then used in sequential learning. The experimental results on eight binary classification problems and three multiclass classification problems have shown that FOS-ELM updated by the new samples with high-output fuzziness has better generalization performance than OS-ELM. Since the unimportant data are discarded before sequential learning, FOS-ELM can save more memory and have higher computational efficiency. In addition, FOS-ELM can handle data one-by-one or chunk-by-chunk with fixed or varying sizes. The relationship between the fuzziness of new samples and the model performance is also studied in this paper, which is expected to provide some useful guidelines for improving the generalization ability of online sequential learning algorithms.