Uncertainty Quantification of Next Generation Reservoir Computing with Applications to Memory-Driven Dynamical Systems

Livia Popa, Sumanta Basu, Martin T. Wells

Nonlinear dynamical systems with memory arise across science and engineering, yet uncertainty quantification for efficient forecasting methods such as Next Generation Reservoir Computing (NGRC) remains underdeveloped. We study Bayesian ridge and conformal prediction intervals for NGRC and characterize when their uncertainty estimates agree or differ. In low dimensions, their asymptotic widths are governed by different summaries of the residual distribution, so agreement depends on residual shape rather than dimensionality alone. In high dimensions, regularization introduces a further tradeoff between estimation variance, shrinkage bias, and posterior uncertainty, leading to an explicit transition between regimes where Bayesian intervals are wider or narrower than conformal intervals. We extend these results to quadratic NGRC feature maps and give sufficient conditions for transferring the analysis to temporally dependent forecast windows. Simulations and real-data experiments support the theoretical predictions and illustrate how residual distribution, regularization, dimensionality, and distribution shift affect interval calibration and efficiency. These results provide a…