Abstract
A population of neurons typically exhibits a broad diversity of responses to sensory inputs. The intuitive notion of functional classification is that cells can be clustered so that most of the diversity is captured by the identity of the clusters rather than by individuals within clusters. We show how this intuition can be made precise using information theory, without any need to introduce a metric on the space of stimuli or responses. Applied to the retinal ganglion cells of the salamander, this approach recovers classical results, but also provides clear evidence for subclasses beyond those identified previously. Further, we find that each of the ganglion cells is functionally unique, and that even within the same subclass only a few spikes are needed to reliably distinguish between cells.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 - Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, NIPS 2002 |
Publisher | Neural information processing systems foundation |
ISBN (Print) | 0262025507, 9780262025508 |
State | Published - Jan 1 2003 |
Event | 16th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2002 - Vancouver, BC, Canada Duration: Dec 9 2002 → Dec 14 2002 |
Other
Other | 16th Annual Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, NIPS 2002 |
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Country/Territory | Canada |
City | Vancouver, BC |
Period | 12/9/02 → 12/14/02 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Information Systems
- Signal Processing