In this brief, a new outlier-resistant state estimation (SE) problem is addressed for a class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with mixed time-delays. The mixed time delays comprise both discrete and distributed delays that occur frequently in signal transmissions among artificial neurons. Measurement outputs are sometimes subject to abnormal disturbances (resulting probably from sensor aging/outages/faults/failures and unpredictable environmental changes) leading to measurement outliers

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... would deteriorate the estimation performance if directly taken into the innovation in the estimator design. We propose to use a certain confidence-dependent saturation function to mitigate the side effects from the measurement outliers on the estimation error dynamics (EEDs). Through using a combination of Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and inequality manipulations, a delay-dependent criterion is established for the existence of the outlier-resistant state estimator ensuring that the corresponding EED achieves the asymptotic stability with a prescribed H∞ performance index. Then, the explicit characterization of the estimator gain is obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. Finally, numerical simulation is carried out to demonstrate the usefulness of the derived theoretical results.