Scalable wide neural network: A parallel, incremental learning model using splitting iterative least squares

Abstract

With the rapid development of research on machine learning models, especially deep learning, more and more endeavors have been made on designing new learning models with properties such as fast training with good convergence, and incremental learning to overcome catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose a scalable wide neural network (SWNN), composed of multiple multi-channel wide RBF neural networks (MWRBF). The MWRBF neural network focuses on different regions of data and nonlinear transformations can be performed with Gaussian kernels. The number of MWRBFs for proposed SWNN is decided by the scale and difficulty of learning tasks. The splitting and iterative least squares (SILS) training method is proposed to make the training process easy with large and high dimensional data. Because the least squares method can find pretty good weights during the first iteration, only a few succeeding iterations are needed to fine tune the SWNN. Experiments were performed on different datasets including gray and colored MNIST data, hyperspectral remote sensing data (KSC, Pavia Center, Pavia University, and Salinas), and compared with main stream learning models. The results show that the proposed SWNN is highly competitive with the other models.