Semi-supervised and unsupervised extreme learning machines

Extreme learning machines (ELMs) have proven to be efficient and effective learning mechanisms for pattern classification and regression. However, ELMs are primarily applied to supervised learning problems. Only a few existing research papers have used ELMs to explore unlabeled data. In this paper, we extend ELMs for both semi-supervised and unsupervised tasks based on the manifold regularization, thus greatly expanding the applicability of ELMs. The key advantages of the proposed algorithms are as follows: 1) both the semi-supervised ELM (SS-ELM) and the unsupervised ELM (US-ELM) exhibit learning capability and computational efficiency of ELMs; 2) both algorithms naturally handle multiclass classification or multicluster clustering; and 3) both algorithms are inductive and can handle unseen data at test time directly. Moreover, it is shown in this paper that all the supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised ELMs can actually be put into a unified framework. This provides new perspectives for understanding the mechanism of random feature mapping, which is the key concept in ELM theory. Empirical study on a wide range of data sets demonstrates that the proposed algorithms are competitive with the state-of-the-art semi-supervised or unsupervised learning algorithms in terms of accuracy and efficiency.