Combining Probabilistic Population Codes

We study the problem of statistically correct inference in networks whose basic representations are population codes. Population codes are ubiquitous in the brain, and involve the simultaneous activity of many units coding for some low dimensional quantity. A classic example are place cells in the rat hippocampus: these fire when the animal is at a particular place in an environment, so the underlying quantity has two dimensions of spatial location. We show how to interpret the activity as encoding whole probability distributions over the underlying variable rather then just single values, and propose a method of inductively learning mappings between population codes that are computationally tractable and yet offer good approximations to statistically optimal inference. We simulate the method on some simple examples to prove its competence.

[1]  D. Rubin,et al.  Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM - algorithm plus discussions on the paper , 1977 .

[2]  E I Knudsen,et al.  A neural map of auditory space in the owl. , 1978, Science.

[3]  A. P. Georgopoulos,et al.  Neuronal population coding of movement direction. , 1986, Science.

[4]  H Sompolinsky,et al.  Simple models for reading neuronal population codes. , 1993, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[5]  Charles H. Anderson,et al.  BASIC ELEMENTS OF BIOLOGICAL COMPUTATIONAL SYSTEMS , 1994 .

[6]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  The "wake-sleep" algorithm for unsupervised neural networks. , 1995, Science.

[7]  L F Abbott,et al.  Transfer of coded information from sensory to motor networks , 1995, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[8]  A. Yuille,et al.  Bayesian decision theory and psychophysics , 1996 .

[9]  Herman P. Snippe,et al.  Parameter Extraction from Population Codes: A Critical Assessment , 1996, Neural Computation.

[10]  Keiji Tanaka,et al.  Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. , 1996, Annual review of neuroscience.

[11]  Alexandre Pouget,et al.  Probabilistic Interpretation of Population Codes , 1996, Neural Computation.