MR-ELM: a MapReduce-based framework for large-scale ELM training in big data era

In the big data era, extreme learning machine (ELM) can be a good solution for the learning of large sample data as it has high generalization performance and fast training speed. However, the emerging big and distributed data blocks may still challenge the method as they may cause large-scale training which is hard to be finished by a common commodity machine in a limited time. In this paper, we propose a MapReduce-based distributed framework named MR-ELM to enable large-scale ELM training. Under the framework, ELM submodels are trained parallelly with the distributed data blocks on the cluster and then combined as a complete single-hidden layer feedforward neural network. Both classification and regression capabilities of MR-ELM have been theoretically proven, and its generalization performance is shown to be as high as that of the original ELM and some common ELM ensemble methods through many typical benchmarks. Compared with the original ELM and the other parallel ELM algorithms, MR-ELM is a general and scalable ELM training framework for both classification and regression and is suitable for big data learning under the cloud environment where the data are usually distributed instead of being located in one machine.