From Many Models, One: Macroeconomic Forecasting with Reservoir Ensembles

Abstract: Model combination is a powerful approach to achieve superior performance with a set of models than by just selecting any single one. We study both theoretically and empirically the effectiveness of ensembles of Multi-Frequency Echo State Networks (MFESNs), which have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art macroeconomic time series forecasting results (Ballarin et al., 2024a). Hedge and Follow-the-Leader schemes are discussed, and their online learning guarantees are extended to the case of dependent data. In applications, our proposed Ensemble Echo State Networks show significantly improved predictive performance compared to individual MFESN models.