Differential Evolution Extreme Learning Machine for the Classification of Hyperspectral Images

Recently, a new machine learning approach that is termed as the extreme learning machine (ELM) has been introduced in the literature. This approach is characterized by a unified formulation for regression, binary, and multiclass classification problems, and the related solution is given in an analytical compact form. In this letter, we propose an efficient classification method for hyperspectral images based on this machine learning approach. To address the model selection issue that is associated with the ELM, we develop an automatic-solution-based differential evolution (DE). This simple yet powerful evolutionary optimization algorithm uses cross-validation accuracy as a performance indicator for determining the optimal ELM parameters. Experimental results obtained from four benchmark hyperspectral data sets confirm the attractive properties of the proposed DE-ELM method in terms of classification accuracy and computation time.