RNNs can be stateful, which means that they can maintain state across batches during training. That is, the hidden state computed for a batch of training data will be used as the initial hidden state for the next batch of training data. However, this needs to be explicitly set, since Keras RNNs are stateless by default and resets the state after each batch. Setting an RNN to be stateful means that it can build a state across its training sequence and even maintain that state when doing predictions.
The benefits of using stateful RNNs are smaller network sizes and/or lower training times. The disadvantage is that we are now responsible for training the network with a batch size that reflects the periodicity of the data, and resetting the state after each epoch. In addition, data should not be shuffled while training the network, since the order in which the data is presented is relevant for stateful networks.
