An Echo State Network
An Echo State Network (ESN) is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) that falls under the umbrella of reservoir computing. It is characterized by a sparsely connected hidden layer, often referred to as the ‘reservoir’, where the connectivity and weights of the neurons are fixed and randomly assigned.
Areas of application
- Time series prediction
- Speech recognition
- Pattern recognition
- System identification
- Robotics
- Spatio-temporal data modeling
- Neuroscience
Example
An ESN can be used to model a complex system, such as a mechanical oscillator, by iteratively feeding it inputs and observing its output. By adjusting the input signals and observing the resulting output patterns, the ESN can learn to mimic the behavior of the original system.