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Poster
Linear dynamical neural population models through nonlinear embeddings
Yuanjun Gao · Evan W Archer · Liam Paninski · John Cunningham

Wed Dec 07 09:00 AM -- 12:30 PM (PST) @ Area 5+6+7+8 #109 #None
in Wednesday Posters »

A body of recent work in modeling neural activity focuses on recovering low- dimensional latent features that capture the statistical structure of large-scale neural populations. Most such approaches have focused on linear generative models, where inference is computationally tractable. Here, we propose fLDS, a general class of nonlinear generative models that permits the firing rate of each neuron to vary as an arbitrary smooth function of a latent, linear dynamical state. This extra flexibility allows the model to capture a richer set of neural variability than a purely linear model, but retains an easily visualizable low-dimensional latent space. To fit this class of non-conjugate models we propose a variational inference scheme, along with a novel approximate posterior capable of capturing rich temporal correlations across time. We show that our techniques permit inference in a wide class of generative models.We also show in application to two neural datasets that, compared to state-of-the-art neural population models, fLDS captures a much larger proportion of neural variability with a small number of latent dimensions, providing superior predictive performance and interpretability.

Keywords: (Other) Unsupervised Learning Methods · Variational Inference · Nonlinear Dimension Reduction and Manifold Learning · (Other) Neuroscience · (Cognitive/Neuroscience) Neural Coding · Time Series Analysis
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Author Information

Yuanjun Gao (Columbia University)
Evan W Archer (Sony AI)
Liam Paninski (Columbia University)
John Cunningham (University of Columbia)

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