“…In the last few years, diverse machine learning (ML) methods have been proposed for the recognition of spike patterns generated by neural populations (Ambard and Rotter, 2012;Tapson et al, 2013;Grassia et al, 2017;Nazari and Faes, 2019). The ability to learn and decode spike patterns is not only useful for the interpretation of biological mechanisms (Koyama et al, 2010;Rudnicki et al, 2012;Heelan et al, 2019) but also for engineering applications, such as artificial vision and hearing (Nogueira et al, 2007;Zai et al, 2015;Schofield et al, 2018) analysis of brain signals (Susi et al, 2018), forecasting of energy consumption (Kulkarni et al, 2013), and so on. Most of such ML methods are based on neural networks, and specifically on the bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) (Maass, 1997;Florian, 2012).…”