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  • Modeling Neural Activity by Variable Length Markov Chains

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    antonio.zippo
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    Interactions between neurons can generate very complex and time-delayed patterns. In fact, neural interactions may reflect a complex anatomical substrate, where chains of activations trigger complex collective and self-organized phenomena. This represents a potential problem in experimental configurations where delayed communications between neurons are taken into consideration. Standard techniques like correlation analysis are, in many cases, unable to detect such events. Such a problem can be solved by mathematical tools able to model arbitrarily long temporal relationships. A novel framework wherein spike trains with arbitrarily long temporal dependencies are modeled by Markov stochastic models has been proposed. Typically, in regular Markov models, each state depends only on the previous state while higher-order Markov models suffer from high state-space computational complexity. Here, the Variable-length Markov Models (VMMs) are considered because they are able to overcome these limitations. Such a methodology has showed several interesting potentialities capturing key elements in neural functional dependencies between couples of neurons.

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    Modeling neural activity by Variable Length Markov Chains

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    Interactions between neurons can generate very complex and time-delayed patterns. In fact, neural interactions may reflect a complex anatomical substrate, where chains of activations trigger complex collective and self-organized phenomena. This represents a potential problem in experimental configurations where delayed communications between neurons are taken into consideration. Standard techniques like correlation analysis are, in many cases, unable to detect such events. Such a problem can be solved by mathematical tools able to model arbitrarily long temporal relationships. A novel framework wherein spike trains with arbitrarily long temporal dependencies are modeled by Markov stochastic models has been proposed. Typically, in regular Markov models, each state depends only on the previous state while higher-order Markov models suffer from high state-space computational complexity. Here, the Variable-length Markov Models (VMMs) are considered because they are able to overcome these limitations. Such a methodology has showed several interesting potentialities capturing key elements in neural functional dependencies between couples of neurons.

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    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    16 views14 pages

    Modeling Neural Activity by Variable Length Markov Chains

    Uploaded by

    antonio.zippo
    Interactions between neurons can generate very complex and time-delayed patterns. In fact, neural interactions may reflect a complex anatomical substrate, where chains of activations trigger complex collective and self-organized phenomena. This represents a potential problem in experimental configurations where delayed communications between neurons are taken into consideration. Standard techniques like correlation analysis are, in many cases, unable to detect such events. Such a problem can be solved by mathematical tools able to model arbitrarily long temporal relationships. A novel framework wherein spike trains with arbitrarily long temporal dependencies are modeled by Markov stochastic models has been proposed. Typically, in regular Markov models, each state depends only on the previous state while higher-order Markov models suffer from high state-space computational complexity. Here, the Variable-length Markov Models (VMMs) are considered because they are able to overcome these limitations. Such a methodology has showed several interesting potentialities capturing key elements in neural functional dependencies between couples of neurons.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Outline of Topics

    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    The Brain and Neurons


    The Brain as a computational device

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    The Brain and Neurons


    Among the brain cells, neurons are the main characters and the fundamental functional unit for information processing

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Networks of Neurons
    Neurons compose networks

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Electrophysiological Recordings and Spike Sorting


    Neural activity can be tracked by means of micro-electrodes matrices which capture activities of several neurons; the spike sorting procedure separate the activity of each neurons; the neural event of action potential represents the information carrier

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Spike Trains

    The collection of the action potential occurrences compose the spike train

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Neural Code

    Neural code is likely to directly represent information just memorized or recalled; In the late 40s Donald Hebb postulated that sequences of neural activations could be expressions of memory traces (cell assemblies). The neural activity of each neuron is strongly inuenced by the activities of thousands other neurons. Therefore, to identify cell assemblies is hard task. Common approaches are based on correlation analyses but fails in presence of noise, i.e. the product of other neural interactions.

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Symbol Sources

    Neural activities can be considered as unknown discrete symbol sources S = , P where is the source alphabet and P is the unknown symbol probability distribution. A VOMM outlines the possibility to take in consideration only transition probabilities that eectively appear in an examined sequence. Namely, there exist p ( |ck ) with k {1, 2, . . . , K } only for the ck contexts encountered in the training sequence, where K is the maximum order of temporal dependency allowed.

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Variable Length Markov Chains


    Let {Xt }t N be a stationary stochastic process with values Xt , || < . Let K be the maximum allowed order with 0 K and let c () be the function that establish the order s for any given context xij = xi xi +1 . . . xj with j < i and i , j N, so that P {Xt = xt |Xt 1 = xt 1 , Xt 2 = xt 2 , . . . } = P {Xt = xt |Xt 1 = xt 1 , . . . , Xt s = xt s }
    1 with s = c (Xtt K ). Then {Xt } is called the Variable Length Markov Chain of order K .

    B uhlmann P, Wyner AJ (1999). The Annals of Statistics 27(2):480-513.


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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    An example of VLMCs

    Suppose that we observe the sequence T = x x x = x 11 = abracadabra generated by the source x1 1 2 T 1 S = , P with = {a, b, c, d, r}. Then, we let K = 2. To build a VOMM for this sequence, we need to estimate the symbol through the estimation of probability distribution P with P conditional probabilities p ( |s ) such that s is a subsequence of T . Thus, we rst extract the contexts of length 1 that trivially x1 are the alphabet symbols and then we proceed with contexts of length 2 that are s {ab, br, ra, ca, ac, ad, da}.

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

    Prex Trees

    Ecient data structures that help to estimate the conditional probabilities for a given sequence are the Prex Trees. These data structures store in their nodes every prex of a given sequence. Recalling the previous toy example, we can build a prex ||-ary 11 = abracadabra that is tree with depth K for sequence x1

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    Outline Biological Background Motivations Mathematical Model Results

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