Providing an analytical treatment to the stochastic feature of neurons' dynamics is one of the current biggest challenges in mathematical biology. The noisy leaky integrate-and-fire model and its associated Fokker-Planck equation are probably the most popular way to deal with neural variability. Another well-known formalism is the escape-rate model: a model giving the probability that a neuron fires at a certain time knowing the time elapsed since its last action potential. This model leads to a so-called age-structured system, a partial differential equation with non-local boundary condition famous in the field of population dynamics, where the age of a neuron is the amount of time passed by since its previous spike. In this theoretical paper, we investigate the mathematical connection between the two formalisms. We shall derive an integral transform of the solution to the age-structured model into the solution of the Fokker-Planck equation. This integral transform highlights the link between the two stochastic processes. As far as we know, an explicit mathematical correspondence between the two solutions has not been introduced until now.

Identifying the right tools to express the stochastic aspects of neural activity has proven to be one of the biggest challenges in computational neuroscience. Even if there is no definitive answer to this issue, the most common procedure to express this randomness is the use of stochastic models. In accordance with the origin of variability, the sources of randomness are classified as intrinsic or extrinsic and give rise to distinct mathematical frameworks to track down the dynamics of the cell. While the external variability is generally treated by the use of a Wiener process in models such as the Integrate-andFire model, the internal variability is mostly expressed via a random firing process. In this paper, we investigate how those distinct expressions of variability can be related. To do so, we examine the probability density functions to the corresponding stochastic models and investigate in what way they can be mapped one to another via integral transforms. Our theoretical findings offer a new insight view into the particular categories of variability and it confirms that, despite their contrasting nature, the mathematical formalization of internal and external variability are strikingly similar..

Finding a mathematical model that incorporates various stochastic aspects of neural dynamics has proven to be a continuous challenge. Among the different approaches, the noisy leaky integrate-and-fire and the escape rate models are probably the most popular. These two models are generally thought to express different noise action over the neural cell. In this paper we investigate the link between the two formalisms in the case of a neuron subject to a time dependent input. To this aim, we introduce a new general stochastic framework. As we shall prove, our general framework entails the two already existing ones. Our results have theoretical implications since they offer a general view upon the two stochastic processes mostly used in neuroscience, upon the way they can be linked, and explain their observed statistical similarity.

Abstract. In this paper we deal with a model describing the evolution in time of the density of a neural population in a state space, where the state is given by Izhikevich's two -dimensional single neuron model. The main goal is to mathematically describe the occurrence of a significant phenomenon observed in neurons populations, the synchronization. To this end, we are making the transition to phase density population, and use Malkin theorem to calculate the phase deviations of a weakly coupled population model.