Extreme learning machine: RBF network case

A new learning algorithm called extreme learning machine (ELM) has recently been proposed for single-hidden layer feedforward neural networks (SLFNs) to easily achieve good generalization performance at extremely fast learning speed. ELM randomly chooses the input weights and analytically determines the output weights of SLFNs. This paper shows that ELM can be extended to radial basis function (RBF) network case, which allows the centers and impact widths of RBF kernels to be randomly generated and the output weights to be simply analytically calculated instead of iteratively tuned. Interestingly, the experimental results show that the ELM algorithm for RBF networks can complete learning at extremely fast speed and produce generalization performance very close to that of SVM in many artificial and real benchmarking function approximation and classification problems. Since ELM does not require validation and human-intervened parameters for given network architectures, ELM can be easily used.