They are from a more general implementation that didn't make it into the pull request.  They were originally there to support user provided input activation and component generation methods without subclassing.

I was looking at implementing the generalized RBF from [MELM-GRBF, Gutierrez](http://sci2s.ugr.es/keel/pdf/keel/articulo/2011-Neurocomputing1.pdf) which could use the `generate_component()` method, and generalized input activations of the form `alpha*f(dot_product()) + beta*g(distance())` or `f(alpha*dot_product() + beta*distance())` (see [Conic Section Function Networks, Dorffner](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01969729408902340)) which could make use of the `compute_input_activation()` method, to add more ELM candidates in the [Caruana ensemble selection](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~caruana/ctp/ct.papers/caruana.icml04.icdm06long.pdf) techniques that led me to wanting to use the ELM in the first place.

(TL;DR) I personally have use for them, so it would be nice if I could keep them present but private.