Abstract: The traditional transient electromagnetic inversion method using artificial neural network based on gradient descent method is inefficient and can not guarantee global convergence. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a transient electromagnetic inversion method based on on online sequential extreme learning machine (OSELM). This approaches is used for inversion of high-dimensional exploration data obtained by transient electromagnetic method. Firstly, the hidden layer parameters (input weight and deviation) are randomly set to simplify the learning process of the model. Then, the prediction samples obtained from the test are added to the training samples as the next update information, and the online sequential extreme learning machine prediction model is established to maximize the inverse accuracy. Finally, the inversion results of two classical TEM layered geoelectric models and a quasi two-dimensional geoelectric model show that the proposed method can solve the problem of nonlinear modeling and high-dimensional data for TEM inversion, and a comparison with extreme learning machine (ELM) shows that this method has more accurate inversion, better generalization ability and higher calculation efficiency, which provides a new idea for the application of neural network in geophysical inversion.