Title
Bayesian inference for generalized linear models for spiking neurons.
Abstract
Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) are commonly used statistical methods for modelling the relationship between neural population activity and presented stimuli. When the dimension of the parameter space is large, strong regularization has to be used in order to fit GLMs to datasets of realistic size without overfitting. By imposing properly chosen priors over parameters, Bayesian inference provides an effective and principled approach for achieving regularization. Here we show how the posterior distribution over model parameters of GLMs can be approximated by a Gaussian using the Expectation Propagation algorithm. In this way, we obtain an estimate of the posterior mean and posterior covariance, allowing us to calculate Bayesian confidence intervals that characterize the uncertainty about the optimal solution. From the posterior we also obtain a different point estimate, namely the posterior mean as opposed to the commonly used maximum a posteriori estimate. We systematically compare the different inference techniques on simulated as well as on multi-electrode recordings of retinal ganglion cells, and explore the effects of the chosen prior and the performance measure used. We find that good performance can be achieved by choosing an Laplace prior together with the posterior mean estimate.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.3389/fncom.2010.00012
FRONTIERS IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Keywords
Field
DocType
spiking neurons,Bayesian inference,population coding,sparsity,multielectrode recordings,receptive field,GLM,functional connectivity
Point estimation,Neuroscience,Bayesian experimental design,Bayesian inference,Bayesian linear regression,Posterior probability,Artificial intelligence,Maximum a posteriori estimation,Expectation propagation,Prior probability,Mathematics,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
4
1662-5188
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.89
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gerwinn, Sebastian110712.84
Jakob H Macke215814.15
Matthias Bethge3131682.73