Model-based decoding, information estimation, and change- point detection in multi-neuron spike trains

Understanding how stimulus information is encoded in spike trains is a central problem in computational neuroscience. Decoding methods provide an important tool for addressing this problem, by allowing us to explicitly read out the information contained in spike responses. Here we introduce several decoding methods based on point-process neural encoding models (i.e. “forward” models that predict spike responses to novel stimuli). These models have concave log-likelihood functions, allowing for efficient fitting via maximum likelihood. Moreover, we may use the likelihood of the observed spike trains under the model to perform optimal decoding. We present: (1) a tractable algorithm for computing the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the stimulus — the most probable stimulus to have generated the observed singleor multiple-spike train response, given some prior distribution over the stimulus; (2) a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution, which allows us to quantify the fidelity with which various stimulus features are encoded; (3) an efficient method for estimating the mutual information between the stimulus and the response; and (4) a framework for the detection of change-point times (e.g. the time at which the stimulus undergoes a change in mean or variance), by marginalizing over the posterior distribution of stimuli. We show several examples illustrating the performance of these estimators with simulated data.