A Point Process Model for Auditory Neurons Considering Both Their Intrinsic Dynamics and the Spectrotemporal Properties of an Extrinsic Signal

We propose a point process model of spiking activity from auditory neurons. The model takes account of the neuron's intrinsic dynamics as well as the spectrotemporal properties of an input stimulus. A discrete Volterra expansion is used to derive the form of the conditional intensity function....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Plourde, Eric, Delgutte, Bertrand, Brown, Emery N.
Other Authors: Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86313
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2668-7819
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1349-9608
Description
Summary:We propose a point process model of spiking activity from auditory neurons. The model takes account of the neuron's intrinsic dynamics as well as the spectrotemporal properties of an input stimulus. A discrete Volterra expansion is used to derive the form of the conditional intensity function. The Volterra expansion models the neuron's baseline spike rate, its intrinsic dynamics-spiking history-and the stimulus effect which in this case is the analog of the spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF). We performed the model fitting efficiently in a generalized linear model framework using ridge regression to address properly this ill-posed maximum likelihood estimation problem. The model provides an excellent fit to spiking activity from 55 auditory nerve neurons. The STRF-like representation estimated jointly with the neuron's intrinsic dynamics may offer more accurate characterizations of neural activity in the auditory system than current ones based solely on the STRF.