Downsizing and enhancing broad learning systems by feature augmentation and residuals boosting

Recently, a broad learning system (BLS) has been theoretically and experimentally confirmed to be an efficient incremental learning system. To get rid of deep architecture, BLS shares the same architecture and learning mechanism of the well-known functional link neural networks (FLNN), but works in broad learning way on both the randomly mapped features of original features of data and their randomly generated enhancement nodes. As such, BLS often requires a huge heap of hidden nodes to achieve the prescribed or satisfactory performance, which may inevitably cause both overwhelming storage requirement and overfitting phenomenon. In this study, a stacked architecture of broad learning systems called D&BLS is proposed to achieve enhanced performance and simultaneously downsize the system architecture. By boosting the residuals between previous and current layers and simultaneously augmenting the original input space with the outputs of the previous layer as the inputs of current layer, D&BLS stacks several lightweight BLS sub-systems to guarantee stronger feature representation capability and better classification/regression performance. Three fast incremental learning algorithms of D&BLS are also developed, without the need for the whole re-training. Experimental results on some popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of D&BLS in the sense of both enhanced performance and reduced system architecture.