Equivalence of approximation by convolutional neural networks and fully-connected networks

Convolutional neural networks are the most widely used type of neural networks in applications. In mathematical analysis, however, mostly fully-connected networks are studied. In this paper, we establish a connection between both network architectures. Using this connection, we show that all upper and lower bounds concerning approximation rates of fully-connected neural networks for functions $f \in \mathcal{C}$---for an arbitrary function class $\mathcal{C}$---translate to essentially the same bounds on approximation rates of convolutional neural networks for functions $f \in {\mathcal{C}^{equi}}$, with the class $\mathcal{C}^{equi}$ consisting of all translation equivariant functions whose first coordinate belongs to $\mathcal{C}$.