2023/10/16 by Christopher W. Lynn, Lynn, Christopher W., Qiwei Yu +7 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Neuroscience · #Gene Regulatory Network Analysis #Neural Networks and Applications #Neural dynamics and brain function #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.bio-ph #q-bio.NC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.10860
openalex publication_date 2023/10/16 · openalex created_date 2023/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Maximum entropy methods provide a principled path connecting measurements of neural activity directly to statistical physics models, and this approach has been successful for populations of N∼ 100 neurons. As N increases in new experiments, we enter an undersampled regime where we have to choose which observables should be constrained in the maximum entropy construction. The best choice is the one that provides the greatest reduction in entropy, defining a "minimax entropy" principle. This principle becomes tractable if we restrict attention to correlations among pairs of neurons that link together into a tree; we can find the best tree efficiently, and the underlying statistical physics models are exactly solved. We use this approach to analyze experiments on N∼ 1500 neurons in the mouse hippocampus, and show that the resulting model captures the distribution of synchronous activity in the network.