Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10 (NIPS 1997)
Virginia de Sa, R. DeCharms, Michael Merzenich
One of the current challenges to understanding neural information processing in biological systems is to decipher the "code" carried by large populations of neurons acting in parallel. We present an algorithm for automated discovery of stochastic firing patterns in large ensembles of neurons. The algorithm, from the "Helmholtz Machine" family, attempts to predict the observed spike patterns in the data. The model consists of an observable layer which is directly activated by the input spike patterns, and hidden units that are ac(cid:173) tivated through ascending connections from the input layer. The hidden unit activity can be propagated down to the observable layer to create a prediction of the data pattern that produced it. Hidden units are added incrementally and their weights are adjusted to im(cid:173) prove the fit between the predictions and data, that is, to increase a bound on the probability of the data given the model. This greedy strategy is not globally optimal but is computationally tractable for large populations of neurons. We show benchmark data on artifi(cid:173) cially constructed spike trains and promising early results on neuro(cid:173) physiological data collected from our chronic multi-electrode cortical implant.