Related papers: Comparison of objective functions for estimating l…
The concept of feature selectivity in sensory signal processing can be formalized as dimensionality reduction: in a stimulus space of very high dimensions, neurons respond only to variations within some smaller, relevant subspace. But if…
Stimulus dimensionality-reduction methods in neuroscience seek to identify a low-dimensional space of stimulus features that affect a neuron's probability of spiking. One popular method, known as maximally informative dimensions (MID), uses…
This paper studies the data-driven reconstruction of firing rate dynamics of brain activity described by linear-threshold network models. Identifying the system parameters directly leads to a large number of variables and a highly…
We study approximation and statistical learning properties of deep ReLU networks under structural assumptions that mitigate the curse of dimensionality. We prove minimax-optimal uniform approximation rates for $s$-H\"older smooth functions…
Advances in machine learning technologies have led to increasingly powerful models in particular in the context of big data. Yet, many application scenarios demand for robustly interpretable models rather than optimum model accuracy; as an…
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a standard linear dimensionality reduction technique for nonnegative data sets. In order to measure the discrepancy between the input data and the low-rank approximation, the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We study the problem of estimating an unknown function from noisy data using shallow ReLU neural networks. The estimators we study minimize the sum of squared data-fitting errors plus a regularization term proportional to the squared…
Neuroscientists have recently shown that images that are difficult to find in visual search elicit similar patterns of firing across a population of recorded neurons. The $L^{1}$ distance between firing rate vectors associated with two…
We propose a method that allows for a rigorous statistical analysis of neural responses to natural stimuli which are non-Gaussian and exhibit strong correlations. We have in mind a model in which neurons are selective for a small number of…
Optimum designs for parameter estimation in generalized regression models are standardly based on the Fisher information matrix (cf. Atkinson et al (2014) for a recent exposition). The corresponding optimality criteria are related to the…
Statistical divergences (SDs), which quantify the dissimilarity between probability distributions, are a basic constituent of statistical inference and machine learning. A modern method for estimating those divergences relies on…
When model predictions inform downstream decision making, a natural question is under what conditions can the decision-makers simply respond to the predictions as if they were the true outcomes. Calibration suffices to guarantee that simple…
We present a theoretical study aiming at model fitting for sensory neurons. Conventional neural network training approaches are not applicable to this problem due to lack of continuous data. Although the stimulus can be considered as a…
Recent works have derived neural networks with online correlation-based learning rules to perform \textit{kernel similarity matching}. These works applied existing linear similarity matching algorithms to nonlinear features generated with…
We present a theoretical application of an optimal experiment design (OED) methodology to the development of mathematical models to describe the stimulus-response relationship of sensory neurons. Although there are a few related studies in…
We present a class of algorithms capable of directly training deep neural networks with respect to large families of task-specific performance measures such as the F-measure and the Kullback-Leibler divergence that are structured and…
We propose a method that would allow for a rigorous statistical analysis of neural responses to natural stimuli, which are non-Gaussian and exhibit strong correlations. We have in mind a model in which neurons are selective for a small…
To make sense of the world our brains must analyze high-dimensional datasets streamed by our sensory organs. Because such analysis begins with dimensionality reduction, modelling early sensory processing requires biologically plausible…
A loss function measures the discrepancy between the true values (observations) and their estimated fits, for a given instance of data. A loss function is said to be proper (unbiased, Fisher consistent) if the fits are defined over a unit…
Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…