Coal Classification Based on Reflection Spectroscopy and the IAT-TELM Algorithm

[Image: see text] As a principal energy globally, coal’s quality and variety critically influence the effectiveness of industrial processes. Different coal types cater to specific industrial requirements due to their unique attributes. Traditional methods for coal classification, typically relying on manual examination and chemical assays, lack efficiency and fail to offer consistent accuracy. Addressing these challenges, this work introduces an algorithm based on the reflectance spectrum of coal and machine learning. This method approach facilitates the rapid and accurate classification of coal types through the analysis of coal spectral data. First, the reflection spectra of three types of coal, namely, bituminous coal, anthracite, and lignite, were collected and preprocessed. Second, a model utilizing two hidden layer extreme learning machine (TELM) and affine transformation function is introduced, which is called affine transformation function TELM (AT-TELM). AT-TELM introduces an affine transformation function on the basis of TELM, so that the hidden layer output satisfies the maximum entropy principle and improves the recognition performance of the model. Third, we improve AT-TELM by optimizing the weight matrix and bias of AT-TELM to address the issue of highly skewed distribution caused by randomly assigned weights and biases. The method is named the improved affine transformation function (IAT-TELM). The experimental findings demonstrate that IAT-TELM achieves a remarkable coal classification accuracy of 97.8%, offering a cost-effective, rapid, and precise method for coal classification.