Receptive Field Inference with Localized Priors

dc.creatorPark, Mijungen
dc.creatorPillow, Jonathan W.en
dc.date.accessioned2013-06-28T15:53:17Zen
dc.date.available2013-06-28T15:53:17Zen
dc.date.issued2011-10-27en
dc.description.abstractThe linear receptive field describes a mapping from sensory stimuli to a one-dimensional variable governing a neuron's spike response. However, traditional receptive field estimators such as the spike-triggered average converge slowly and often require large amounts of data. Bayesian methods seek to overcome this problem by biasing estimates towards solutions that are more likely a priori, typically those with small, smooth, or sparse coefficients. Here we introduce a novel Bayesian receptive field estimator designed to incorporate locality, a powerful form of prior information about receptive field structure. The key to our approach is a hierarchical receptive field model that flexibly adapts to localized structure in both spacetime and spatiotemporal frequency, using an inference method known as empirical Bayes. We refer to our method as automatic locality determination (ALD), and show that it can accurately recover various types of smooth, sparse, and localized receptive fields. We apply ALD to neural data from retinal ganglion cells and V1 simple cells, and find it achieves error rates several times lower than standard estimators. Thus, estimates of comparable accuracy can be achieved with substantially less data. Finally, we introduce a computationally efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for fully Bayesian inference under the ALD prior, yielding accurate Bayesian confidence intervals for small or noisy datasets.en
dc.description.departmentPsychologyen
dc.description.sponsorshipThis work was supported by the UT Austin Center for Perceptual Systems. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.en
dc.identifier.citationPark M, Pillow JW (2011) Receptive Field Inference with Localized Priors. PLoS Comput Biol 7(10): e1002219. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002219en
dc.identifier.doi10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002219en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2152/20558en
dc.language.isoengen
dc.publisherPublic Library of Scienceen
dc.rightsAttribution 3.0 United Statesen
dc.rightsCC-BYen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/en
dc.subjectBayes theoremen
dc.subjectCovarianceen
dc.subjectFourier analysisen
dc.subjectGaussian noiseen
dc.subjectNeuronsen
dc.subjectOptimizationen
dc.subjectRetinal ganglion cellsen
dc.subjectWhite noiseen
dc.titleReceptive Field Inference with Localized Priorsen
dc.typeArticleen

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