Title
Brain-state invariant thalamo-cortical coordination revealed by non-linear encoders.
Abstract
Understanding how neurons cooperate to integrate sensory inputs and guide behavior is a fundamental problem in neuroscience. A large body of methods have been developed to study neuronal firing at the single cell and population levels, generally seeking interpretability as well as predictivity. However, these methods are usually confronted with the lack of ground-truth necessary to validate the approach. Here, using neuronal data from the head-direction (HD) system, we present evidence demonstrating how gradient boosted trees, a non-linear and supervised Machine Learning tool, can learn the relationship between behavioral parameters and neuronal responses with high accuracy by optimizing the information rate. Interestingly, and unlike other classes of Machine Learning methods, the intrinsic structure of the trees can be interpreted in relation to behavior (e.g. to recover the tuning curves) or to study how neurons cooperate with their peers in the network. We show how the method, unlike linear analysis, reveals that the coordination in thalamo-cortical circuits is qualitatively the same during wakefulness and sleep, indicating a brain-state independent feed-forward circuit. Machine Learning tools thus open new avenues for benchmarking model-based characterization of spike trains.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006041
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Field
DocType
Volume
Population,Decision tree,Interpretability,Biology,Pattern recognition,Artificial intelligence,Invariant (mathematics),Bioinformatics,Artificial neural network,Neuronal tuning,Sensory system,Decision tree learning
Journal
14
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
3
1
0.34
References 
Authors
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guillaume Viejo110.34
Thomas Cortier210.34
Adrien Peyrache310.34