ELM-KL-LSTM: a robust and general incremental learning method for efficient classification of time series data

Efficiently analyzing and classifying dynamically changing time series data remains a challenge. The main issue lies in the significant differences in feature distribution that occur between old and new datasets generated constantly due to varying degrees of concept drift, anomalous data, erroneous data, high noise, and other factors. Taking into account the need to balance accuracy and efficiency when the distribution of the dataset changes, we proposed a new robust, generalized incremental learning (IL) model ELM-KL-LSTM. Extreme learning machine (ELM) is used as a lightweight pre-processing model which is updated using the new designed evaluation metrics based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence values to measure the difference in feature distribution within sliding windows. Finally, we implemented efficient processing and classification analysis of dynamically changing time series data based on ELM lightweight pre-processing model, model update strategy and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) classification model. We conducted extensive experiments and comparation analysis based on the proposed method and benchmark methods in several different real application scenarios. Experimental results show that, compared with the benchmark methods, the proposed method exhibits good robustness and generalization in a number of different real-world application scenarios, and can successfully perform model updates and efficient classification analysis of incremental data with varying degrees improvement of classification accuracy. This provides and extends a new means for efficient analysis of dynamically changing time-series data.