Reservoir computing for static pattern recognition
Mark J. Embrechts, Luı́s A. Alexandre, Jonathan D. Linton · 2009
Abstract. This paper introduces reservoir computing for static pattern recognition. Reservoir computing networks are neural networks with a sparsely connected recurrent hidden layer (or reservoir) of neurons. The weights from the inputs to the reservoir and the reservoir weights are randomly selected. The weights of the second layer are determined with a linear partial least squares solver. The outputs of the reservoir layer can be considered to be an unsupervised data transformation. This stage has a brain-like plausibility. This paper shows that by letting the dynamics of the reservoir evolve to a stable solution, and then applying a sigmoid transfer function, reservoir computing can be applied as a robust and highly accurate pattern classifier. Reservoir computing is applied to 16 difficult multi-class classification benchmark cases, and compared with the best results of state-of the art neural network classification methods with entropic error criteria. 1 Introduction to reservoir computing