Information-theoretic analysis of neural systems

As a model for neural processing

J J Atick, Could information theory provide an ecological theory of sensory processing? Network: Computation in Neural Systems 3(3) 213-251 (1992)

H Barlow, Redundancy reduction revisited.

Network: Computation in Neural Systems 12 241-253 (2001)

recent review:

Natural Image Statistics and Neural Representation Simoncelli EP, Olshausen BA (2001) Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 1193-1215. www.cns.nyu.edu/eero/simoncelli01-reprint.pdf

As a tool for neural systems analysis:

a review of "classical" methods:

A Borst and F E Theunissen, Information theory and neural coding. Nature Neuroscience 2 947-957 (1999)

more recent methods:

C. Anderson. Basic elements of biological computational systems. Intern. J. Mod. Phys. C, 5(2):135-137, 1994.

A G Dimitrov and J P Miller, Neural coding and decoding: communication channels and quantization Network: Computation in Neural Systems 12(4) 441-472 (2001)

Johnson D H, Gruner C M, Baggerly K and Seshagiri C 2001 Information-theoretic analysis of the neural code J. Comput. Neurosci. 10 47-70

Johnson explicitly points here how difficult it is to do nonparametric estimates of information-theoretic quantities. For those who are interested, a more comprehensive, and highly techincal treatment of this subject can be found here:

Paninski L 2003 Estimation of entropy and mutual information Neural Comput. at press. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/~liam/nc.ps.gz

S. Panzeri and S. R. Schultz. A unified approach to the study of temporal, correlational and rate coding. Neural Computation, 13(6):1311-1349, 2001.

Victor J D and Purpura K 1997 Metric-space analysis of spike trains: theory, algorithms, and application Network: Comput. Neural Syst. 8 127-64

"The direct method", and some applications. Try to figure out what are the problems with this approach. Hint: something to do with estimates and

errorbars.

Strong S P, Koberle R, de Ruyter van Steveninck R R and Bialek W 1998 Entropy and information in neural spike trains Phys. Rev. Lett. 80 197-200.

Nirenberg S, Carcieri S M, Jacobs A L and Latham P E 2001 Retinal ganglion cells act largely as independent encoders Nature 411 698-701

Reinagel P and Reid R 2000 Temporal coding of visual information in the thalamus J. Neurosci. 20 5392-5400