Centrality-Based Pruning for Efficient Echo State Networks

Abstract: Echo State Networks (ESNs) are a reservoir computing framework widely used for nonlinear time-series prediction. However, despite their effectiveness, the randomly initialized reservoir often contains redundant nodes, leading to unnecessary computational overhead and reduced efficiency. In this work, we propose a graph centrality-based pruning approach that interprets the reservoir as a weighted directed graph and removes structurally less important nodes using centrality measures. Experiments on Mackey-Glass time-series prediction and electric load forecasting demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce reservoir size while maintaining, and in some cases improving, prediction accuracy, while preserving the essential reservoir dynamics.