  The paper presents a novel, principled approach to train recurrent neural
networks from the Reservoir Computing family that are robust to missing part of
the input features at prediction time. By building on the ensembling properties
of Dropout regularization, we propose a methodology, named DropIn, which
efficiently trains a neural model as a committee machine of subnetworks, each
capable of predicting with a subset of the original input features. We discuss
the application of the DropIn methodology in the context of Reservoir Computing
models and targeting applications characterized by input sources that are
unreliable or prone to be disconnected, such as in pervasive wireless sensor
networks and ambient intelligence. We provide an experimental assessment using
real-world data from such application domains, showing how the Dropin
methodology allows to maintain predictive performances comparable to those of a
model without missing features, even when 20\%-50\% of the inputs are not
available.
