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1. Robust point-process Granger causality analysis in presence of exogenous temporal modulations and trial-by-trial variability in spike trains

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007675  

   Casile, Antonino; Faghih, Rose T.; Brown, Emery N. (January 2021, PLOS Computational Biology)

   Morrison, Abigail (Ed.)

   Assessing directional influences between neurons is instrumental to understand how brain circuits process information. To this end, Granger causality, a technique originally developed for time-continuous signals, has been extended to discrete spike trains. A fundamental assumption of this technique is that the temporal evolution of neuronal responses must be due only to endogenous interactions between recorded units, including self-interactions. This assumption is however rarely met in neurophysiological studies, where the response of each neuron is modulated by other exogenous causes such as, for example, other unobserved units or slow adaptation processes. Here, we propose a novel point-process Granger causality technique that is robust with respect to the two most common exogenous modulations observed in real neuronal responses: within-trial temporal variations in spiking rate and between-trial variability in their magnitudes. This novel method works by explicitly including both types of modulations into the generalized linear model of the neuronal conditional intensity function (CIF). We then assess the causal influence of neuron i onto neuron j by measuring the relative reduction of neuron j ’s point process likelihood obtained considering or removing neuron i . CIF’s hyper-parameters are set on a per-neuron basis by minimizing Akaike’s information criterion. In synthetic data sets, generated by means of random processes or networks of integrate-and-fire units, the proposed method recovered with high accuracy, sensitivity and robustness the underlying ground-truth connectivity pattern. Application of presently available point-process Granger causality techniques produced instead a significant number of false positive connections. In real spiking responses recorded from neurons in the monkey pre-motor cortex (area F5), our method revealed many causal relationships between neurons as well as the temporal structure of their interactions. Given its robustness our method can be effectively applied to real neuronal data. Furthermore, its explicit estimate of the effects of unobserved causes on the recorded neuronal firing patterns can help decomposing their temporal variations into endogenous and exogenous components. 

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2. High Dimensional Bayesian Regularization in Regressions Involving Symmetric Tensors

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50153-2_26  

   Guhaniyogi, R. (May 2020, Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems)

   Lesot, M. (Ed.)

   This article develops a regression framework with a symmetric tensor response and vector predictors. The existing literature involving symmetric tensor response and vector predictors proceeds by vectorizing the tensor response to a multivariate vector, thus ignoring the structural information in the tensor. A few recent approaches have proposed novel regression frameworks exploiting the structure of the symmetric tensor and assume symmetric tensor coefficients corresponding to scalar predictors to be low-rank. Although low-rank constraint on coefficient tensors are computationally efficient, they might appear to be restrictive in some real data applications. Motivated by this, we propose a novel class of regularization or shrinkage priors for the symmetric tensor coefficients. Our modeling framework a-priori expresses a symmetric tensor coefficient as sum of low rank and sparse structures, with both these structures being suitably regularized using Bayesian regularization techniques. The proposed framework allows identification of tensor nodes significantly influenced by each scalar predictor. Our framework is implemented using an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Empirical results in simulation studies show competitive performance of the proposed approach over its competitors. 

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3. Rescuing neural spike train models from bad MLE

   Arribas, D. M.; Zhao, Y. & (January 2020, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS))

   null (Ed.)

   The standard approach to fitting an autoregressive spike train model is to maximize the likelihood for one-step prediction. This maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often leads to models that perform poorly when generating samples recursively for more than one time step. Moreover, the generated spike trains can fail to capture important features of the data and even show diverging firing rates. To alleviate this, we propose to directly minimize the divergence between neural recorded and model generated spike trains using spike train kernels. We develop a method that stochastically optimizes the maximum mean discrepancy induced by the kernel. Experiments performed on both real and synthetic neural data validate the proposed approach, showing that it leads to well-behaving models. Using different combinations of spike train kernels, we show that we can control the trade-off between different features which is critical for dealing with model-mismatch. 

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4. Temporal Spike Sequence Learning via Backpropagation for Deep Spiking Neural Networks

   Zhang, Wenrui; Li, Peng (December 2020, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are well suited for spatio-temporal learning and implementations on energy-efficient event-driven neuromorphic processors. However, existing SNN error backpropagation (BP) methods lack proper handling of spiking discontinuities and suffer from low performance compared with the BP methods for traditional artificial neural networks. In addition, a large number of time steps are typically required to achieve decent performance, leading to high latency and rendering spike based computation unscalable to deep architectures. We present a novel Temporal Spike Sequence Learning Backpropagation (TSSL-BP) method for training deep SNNs, which breaks down error backpropagation across two types of inter-neuron and intra-neuron dependencies and leads to improved temporal learning precision. It captures inter-neuron dependencies through presynaptic firing times by considering the all-or-none characteristics of firing activities, and captures intra-neuron dependencies by handling the internal evolution of each neuronal state in time. TSSL-BP efficiently trains deep SNNs within a much shortened temporal window of a few steps while improving the accuracy for various image classification datasets including CIFAR10. 

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5. The neuron as a direct data-driven controller

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311893121  

   Moore, Jason J; Genkin, Alexander; Tournoy, Magnus; Pughe-Sanford, Joshua L; de_Ruyter_van_Steveninck, Rob R; Chklovskii, Dmitri B (July 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   In the quest to model neuronal function amid gaps in physiological data, a promising strategy is to develop a normative theory that interprets neuronal physiology as optimizing a computational objective. This study extends current normative models, which primarily optimize prediction, by conceptualizing neurons as optimal feedback controllers. We posit that neurons, especially those beyond early sensory areas, steer their environment toward a specific desired state through their output. This environment comprises both synaptically interlinked neurons and external motor sensory feedback loops, enabling neurons to evaluate the effectiveness of their control via synaptic feedback. To model neurons as biologically feasible controllers which implicitly identify loop dynamics, infer latent states, and optimize control we utilize the contemporary direct data-driven control (DD-DC) framework. Our DD-DC neuron model explains various neurophysiological phenomena: the shift from potentiation to depression in spike-timing-dependent plasticity with its asymmetry, the duration and adaptive nature of feedforward and feedback neuronal filters, the imprecision in spike generation under constant stimulation, and the characteristic operational variability and noise in the brain. Our model presents a significant departure from the traditional, feedforward, instant-response McCulloch–Pitts–Rosenblatt neuron, offering a modern, biologically informed fundamental unit for constructing neural networks. 

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