Negative Correlation Learning (NCL) has been successfully applied to construct neural network ensembles. It encourages the
neural networks that compose the ensemble to be different from each other and, at the same time, accurate. The difference
among the neural networks that compose an ensemble is a desirable feature to perform incremental learning, for some of the
neural networks can be able to adapt faster and better to new data than the others. So, NCL is a potentially powerful approach
to incremental learning. With this in mind, this paper presents an analysis of NCL, aiming at determining its weak and strong
points to incremental learning. The analysis shows that it is possible to use NCL to overcome catastrophic forgetting, an
important problem related to incremental learning. However, when catastrophic forgetting is very low, no advantage of using
more than one neural network of the ensemble to learn new data is taken and the test error is high. When all the neural networks
are used to learn new data, some of them can indeed adapt better than the others, but a higher catastrophic forgetting is
obtained. In this way, it is important to find a trade-off between overcoming catastrophic forgetting and using an entire
ensemble to learn new data. The NCL results are comparable with other approaches which were specifically designed to incremental
learning. Thus, the study presented in this work reveals encouraging results with negative correlation in incremental learning,
showing that NCL is a promising approach to incremental learning.
Keywords Neural network ensembles - Incremental learning - Negative correlation learning - Multi-layer perceptrons - Self-generating neural tree - Self-organising neural grove - Classification