Time Series Classification Based on Forward Echo State Convolution Network

The Echo state network (ESN) is an efficient recurrent neural network that has achieved good results in time series prediction tasks. Still, its application in time series classification tasks has yet to develop fully. In this study, we work on the time series classification problem based on echo state networks. We propose a new framework called forward echo state convolutional network (FESCN). It consists of two parts, the encoder and the decoder, where the encoder part is composed of a forward topology echo state network (FT-ESN), and the decoder part mainly consists of a convolutional layer and a max-pooling layer. We apply the proposed network framework to the univariate time series dataset UCR and compare it with six traditional methods and four neural network models. The experimental findings demonstrate that FESCN outperforms other methods in terms of overall classification accuracy. Additionally, we investigated the impact of reservoir size on network performance and observed that the optimal classification results were obtained when the reservoir size was set to 32. Finally, we investigated the performance of the network under noise interference, and the results show that FESCN has a more stable network performance compared to EMN (echo memory network).