Extreme learning machines for exoplanet simulations: a faster, lightweight alternative to deep learning

ABSTRACT Increasing resolution and coverage of astrophysical and climate data necessitates increasingly sophisticated models, often pushing the limits of computational feasibility. While emulation methods can reduce calculation costs, the neural architectures typically used – optimized via gradient descent – are themselves computationally expensive to train, particularly in terms of data generation requirements. This paper investigates the utility of the extreme learning machine (ELM) as a lightweight, non-gradient-based machine learning algorithm for accelerating complex physical models. We evaluate ELM surrogate models in two test cases with different data structures: (i) sequentially structured data, and (ii) image-structured data. For test case (i), where the number of samples $N \gg$ the dimensionality of input data d, ELMs achieve remarkable efficiency, offering a 100 000$\times$ faster training time and a 40$\times$ faster prediction speed compared to a Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Network (BIRNN), whilst improving upon BIRNN test performance. For test case (ii), characterized by $d \gg N$ and image-based inputs, a single ELM was insufficient, but an ensemble of 50 individual ELM predictors achieves comparable accuracy to a benchmark convolutional neural network (CNN), with a 16.4$\times$ reduction in training time, though costing a 6.9$\times$ increase in prediction time. We find different sample efficiency characteristics between the test cases: in test case (i) individual ELMs demonstrate superior sample efficiency, requiring only 0.28 per cent of the training data set compared to the benchmark BIRNN, while in test case (ii) the ensemble approach requires 78 per cent of the data used by the CNN to achieve comparable results – representing a trade-off between sample efficiency and model complexity.