Related papers: Maximally Informative Stimuli and Tuning Curves fo…
We have developed an efficient information-maximization method for computing the optimal shapes of tuning curves of sensory neurons by optimizing the parameters of the underlying feedforward network model. When applied to the problem of…
The sigmoidal tuning curve that maximizes the mutual information for a Poisson neuron, or population of Poisson neurons, is obtained. The optimal tuning curve is found to have a discrete structure that results in a quantization of the input…
We examine how the prior probability distribution of a sensory variable in the environment influences the optimal allocation of neurons and spikes in a population that represents that variable. We start with a conventional response model,…
The sensory-triggered activity of a neuron is typically characterized in terms of a tuning curve, which describes the neuron's average response as a function of a parameter that characterizes a physical stimulus. What determines the shapes…
Although Shannon mutual information has been widely used, its effective calculation is often difficult for many practical problems, including those in neural population coding. Asymptotic formulas based on Fisher information sometimes…
Suprathreshold stochastic resonance (SSR) is a form of noise enhanced signal transmission that occurs in a parallel array of independently noisy identical threshold nonlinearities, including model neurons. Unlike most forms of stochastic…
The brain constructs population codes to represent stimuli through widely distributed patterns of activity across neurons. An important figure of merit of population codes is how much information about the original stimulus can be decoded…
While Shannon's mutual information has widespread applications in many disciplines, for practical applications it is often difficult to calculate its value accurately for high-dimensional variables because of the curse of dimensionality.…
The magnitude of correlations between stimulus-driven responses of pairs of neurons can itself be stimulus-dependent. We examine how this dependence impacts the information carried by neural populations about the stimuli that drive them.…
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…
Quantifying the dependence between high-dimensional random variables is central to statistical learning and inference. Two classical methods are canonical correlation analysis (CCA), which identifies maximally correlated projected versions…
Optimality principles have been useful in explaining many aspects of biological systems. In the context of neural encoding in sensory areas, optimality is naturally formulated in a Bayesian setting, as neural tuning which minimizes mean…
We study the optimality conditions of information transfer in systems with memory in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime of vanishing input amplitude. We find that the optimal mutual information is represented by a maximum-variance of the…
Shannon mutual information provides a measure of how much information is, on average, contained in a set of neural activities about a set of stimuli. It has been extensively used to study neural coding in different brain areas. To apply a…
Feature selection is one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning. An extensive body of work on information-theoretic feature selection exists which is based on maximizing mutual information between subsets of features and class…
The efficient coding theory postulates that single cells in a neuronal population should be optimally configured to efficiently encode information about a stimulus subject to biophysical constraints. This poses the question of how multiple…
An unsupervised learning procedure based on maximizing the mutual information between the outputs of two networks receiving different but statistically dependent inputs is analyzed (Becker and Hinton, Nature, 355, 92, 161). For a generic…
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…
Understanding how neural population responses represent sensory information is a central problem in systems neuroscience. One approach is to define a representational geometry on stimulus space in which distances reflect how reliably…
The mutual information is a core statistical quantity that has applications in all areas of machine learning, whether this is in training of density models over multiple data modalities, in maximising the efficiency of noisy transmission…