Abstract
Prediction of physical properties of crude oil plays a key role in the petroleum refining industry, therefore, it is of great significance to establish the prediction model of physical properties of crude oil. In this paper, we propose an ensemble random weights neural network based prediction model whose inputs are nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra and outputs are carbon residual and asphaltene of crude oil. The model uses random vector functional link (RVFL) networks as the basic components and employs the regularized negative correlation learning strategy to build neural network ensemble and the online method to learn the new data. The experiment using the practical data collected from a refinery is carried out and compared with the decorrelated neural network ensembles with random weights (DNNE), least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), partial least squares regression (PLS) and multiple linear regression (MLR). The results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.