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Abstract

In order to understand how neural systems perform computations and process sensory
information, we need to understand the structure of firing patterns in large populations of
neurons. Spike trains recorded from populations of neurons can exhibit substantial pair wise
correlations between neurons and rich temporal structure. Thus, efficient methods for
generating artificial spike trains with specified correlation structure are essential for the
realistic simulation and analysis of neural systems.
Here we show how correlated binary spike trains can be modeled by means of a latent
multivariate Gaussian model. Sampling from our model is computationally very efficient, and
in particular, feasible even for large populations of neurons. We show empirically that the
spike trains generated with this method have entropy close to the theoretical maximum. They
are therefore consistent with specified pair-wise correlations without exhibiting systematic
higher-order correlations. We compare our model to alternative approaches and discuss its
limitations and advantages. In addition, we demonstrate its use for modeling temporal
correlations in a neuron recorded in macaque primary visual cortex.
Neural activity is often summarized by discarding the exact timing of spikes, and only
counting the total number of spikes that a neuron (or population) fires in a given time window.
In modeling studies, these spike counts have often been assumed to be Poisson distributed
and neurons to be independent. However, correlations between spike counts have been
reported in various visual areas. We show how both temporal and inter-neuron correlations
shape the structure of spike counts, and how our model can be used to generate spike counts
with arbitrary marginal distributions and correlation structure. We demonstrate its capabilities
by modeling a population of simultaneously recorded neurons from the primary visual cortex
of a macaque, and we show how a model with correlations accounts for the data far better
than a model that assumes independence.