TY - JOUR
T1 - A new similarity measure for spike trains
T2 - Sensitivity to bursts and periods of inhibition
AU - Lyttle, David
AU - Fellous, Jean Marc
N1 - Funding Information:
Thanks to the Fellous laboratory and Kevin Lin for helpful discussions and proofreading. We also thank Romain Brasselet for assistance in proving the triangle inequality for the ISI distance. Work was supported in part by NIH training grant GM084905 , and in part by a NSF/NIH Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience Program IIS-1010172.
PY - 2011/8/15
Y1 - 2011/8/15
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Neural coding
KW - Neural data analysis
KW - Spike train metrics
KW - Synchrony
KW - Time series analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960240246&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79960240246&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2011.05.005
DO - 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2011.05.005
M3 - Article
C2 - 21600921
AN - SCOPUS:79960240246
SN - 0165-0270
VL - 199
SP - 296
EP - 309
JO - Journal of Neuroscience Methods
JF - Journal of Neuroscience Methods
IS - 2
ER -