A Fast L_p Spike Alignment Metric

2009/07/17 by Alexander Dubbs, Alexander J. Dubbs, Brad A. Seiler +4
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Neuroscience · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #FOS: Biological sciences #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #q-bio.NC #q-bio.QM

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0907.3137

arxiv created 2009/07/17 · openalex publication_date 2009/07/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The metrization of the space of neural responses is an ongoing research program seeking to find natural ways to describe, in geometrical terms, the sets of possible activities in the brain. One component of this program are the \em spike metrics, notions of distance between two spike trains recorded from a neuron. Alignment spike metrics work by identifying "equivalent" spikes in one train and the other. We present an alignment spike metric having L_p underlying geometrical structure; the L₂ version is Euclidean and is suitable for further embedding in Euclidean spaces by Multidimensional Scaling methods or related procedures. We show how to implement a fast algorithm for the computation of this metric based on bipartite graph matching theory.

Citations

• The Multiple Sequence Alignment Problem in Biology
• A Novel Spike Distance

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