A new similarity measure for spike trains: Sensitivity to bursts and periods of inhibition

Abstract

An important problem in neuroscience is that of constructing quantitative measures of the similarity between neural spike trains. These measures can be used, for example, to assess the reliability of the response of a single neuron to repeated stimulus presentations, or to uncover relationships in the firing patterns of multiple neurons in a population. While several similarity measures have been proposed, the extent to which they take into account various biologically important spike train features such as bursts of spikes, or periods of inactivity remains poorly understood. Here we compare these measures using tests specifically designed to assess the sensitivity to bursts and silent periods. In addition, we propose two new measures. The first is designed to detect periods of shared silence between spike trains, while the second is designed to emphasize the presence of common bursts. To assist researchers in determining which measure is best suited to their particular data analysis needs, we also show how these measures can be combined and how their parameters can be determined on the basis of physiologically relevant quantities.

Synchronous firing of antennal-lobe projection neurons encodes the behaviorally effective ratio of sex-pheromone components in male Manduca sexta

“…A correlation-based similarity metric was calculated as an additional measure of synchrony sensitive to fine-scale spike timing (Schreiber et al 2003, Lyttle and Fellous 2011). The latter method confers several benefits over the more widely used histogram-based methods: it does not require the choice of an arbitrary bin size and performs better in discriminating between responses that vary only in the degree of synchronous firing (Paiva et al 2010), and depending on the choice of kernel used in the method (see below), it can make predictions about characteristics of the cell decoding information contained in synchronous spikes (see Discussion).…”

Monitoring Spiking Activity of Many Individual Neurons in Invertebrate Ganglia

“…For example, many clustering methods have been developed that partition network recordings into separate functional ensembles of neurons having significantly correlated firing patterns (Feldt et al 2009; Humphries 2011; Lopes-dos-Santos et al 2011; Lyttle and Fellous 2011; Gerstein et al 2012). Figure 5.7 shows our use of an unsupervised consensus clustering approach applied to a recording of the Aplysia locomotion motor program recorded from the pedal ganglion (Bruno et al 2015).…”

Recent developments in VSD imaging of small neuronal networks

“…Many methods have been developed to partition data sets into ensembles of neurons having significantly correlated firing patterns (Feldt et al 2009;Humphries 2011;Lopes-dos-Santos et al 2011;Lyttle and Fellous 2011;Gerstein et al 2012). Our laboratory has used an unsupervised graph theoretic-based clustering approach to reveal the existence of physically segregated ensembles of neurons that are re-identifiable across preparations during the Aplysia locomotion motor program ( Fig.…”