A Survey on Reservoir Computing and its Interdisciplinary Applications
  Beyond Traditional Machine Learning
Heng Zhang Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas
Reservoir computing (RC), first applied to temporal signal processing, is a
recurrent neural network in which neurons are randomly connected. Once
initialized, the connection strengths remain unchanged. Such a simple structure
turns RC into a non-linear dynamical system that maps low-dimensional inputs
into a high-dimensional space. The model's rich dynamics, linear separability,
and memory capacity then enable a simple linear readout to generate adequate
responses for various applications. RC spans areas far beyond machine learning,
since it has been shown that the complex dynamics can be realized in various
physical hardware implementations and biological devices. This yields greater
flexibility and shorter computation time. Moreover, the neuronal responses
triggered by the model's dynamics shed light on understanding brain mechanisms
that also exploit similar dynamical processes. While the literature on RC is
vast and fragmented, here we conduct a unified review of RC's recent
developments from machine learning to physics, biology, and neuroscience. We
first review the early RC models, and then survey the state-of-the-art models
and their applications. We further introduce studies on modeling the brain's
mechanisms by RC. Finally, we offer new perspectives on RC development,
including reservoir design, coding frameworks unification, physical RC
implementations, and interaction between RC, cognitive neuroscience and
evolution.