Adaptive Robust Stochastic Configuration Networks for Near-Infrared Multivariate Analysis

Near-infrared (NIR) technology has gained wide acceptance in practical processes and is now the measurement of choice in many sectors. However, with increasing spectral dimensionality, it is challenging to establish a prediction model with satisfactory stability and generalization. Stochastic configuration networks (SCNs) based on supervisory learning mechanism have demonstrated significant advantages in developing nonlinear learners. However, existing incremental learning strategies make it difficult to achieve fast convergence while obtaining a suitable-scale network in high-dimensional spectra modeling. In addition, the linear or regularization weight estimation methods are vulnerable to outliers and noise in NIR analysis. To accelerate model construction and improve model performance in high-dimensional spectra analysis, the adaptive robust SCN (AR-SCN) algorithm is proposed in this work, which can perform adaptive incremental learning according to the prediction residual and robustly estimate the output weights by the global-local shrinkage strategy. Comparison results on three benchmark NIR datasets and real-world gasoline blending process verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art SCNs, the AR-SCN method can simultaneously improve the construction efficiency and robustness of SCNs.