Eur. Phys. J. B 68, 283-289 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00081-y

Time-varying irregularities in multiple trial spike data

¹ Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, 153-8505, Tokyo, Japan
² ERATO Aihara Complexity Modelling Project, JST, Tokyo, 153-8505, Japan

Corresponding author: ^a kantaro@sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Received: 1 August 2008
Revised: 22 December 2008
Published online: 6 March 2009

Abstract

The measurement of neuronal firing rates has been a standard methodology for characterizing properties of neurons. The peri-stimulus time histogram (PSTH) is primarily used for visualizing changes of firing rates in relation to an external stimulus or an event. On the other hand, modulation of other statistics such as distribution and patterns of interspike intervals can be an important index for analysis of neuronal response and may provide insights into the neuronal codes. In particular, it is desirable to visualize the temporal modulation not only of the firing rates but also of the other statistics. In this study, we propose an analysis method for measuring irregularities in multiple trial spike data. The method calculates a local measure by extracting a short segment of data within a predefined time bin and connecting them each other. We compare the different data extraction methods in Poisson and gamma processes and show that our proposed method is effective for estimating the statistics of the irregular spike data.