The combination of circle topology and leaky integrator neurons remarkably improves the performance of echo state network on time series prediction.

• Main Authors: Fangzheng Xue, Qian Li, Xiumin Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5536322?pdf=render

Recently, echo state network (ESN) has attracted a great deal of attention due to its high accuracy and efficient learning performance. Compared with the traditional random structure and classical sigmoid units, simple circle topology and leaky integrator neurons have more advantages on reservoir computing of ESN. In this paper, we propose a new model of ESN with both circle reservoir structure and leaky integrator units. By comparing the prediction capability on Mackey-Glass chaotic time series of four ESN models: classical ESN, circle ESN, traditional leaky integrator ESN, circle leaky integrator ESN, we find that our circle leaky integrator ESN shows significantly better performance than other ESNs with roughly 2 orders of magnitude reduction of the predictive error. Moreover, this model has stronger ability to approximate nonlinear dynamics and resist noise than conventional ESN and ESN with only simple circle structure or leaky integrator neurons. Our results show that the combination of circle topology and leaky integrator neurons can remarkably increase dynamical diversity and meanwhile decrease the correlation of reservoir states, which contribute to the significant improvement of computational performance of Echo state network on time series prediction.