Abstract
Identifying the common structure of neural dynamics across subjects is key for extracting unifying principles of brain computation and for many brain machine interface applications. Here, we propose a novel probabilistic approach for aligning stimulus-evoked responses from multiple animals in a common low dimensional manifold and use hierarchical inference to identify which stimulus drives neural activity in any given trial. Our probabilistic decoder is robust to a range of features of the neural responses and significantly outperforms existing neural alignment procedures. When applied to recordings from the mouse olfactory bulb, our approach reveals low-dimensional population dynamics that are odor specific and have consistent structure across animals. Thus, our decoder can be used for increasing the robustness and scalability of neural-based chemical detection.
Competing Interest Statement
D.R. is one of the founders of a company that commercializes related bio-electronic technology (Shor et al, 2020).
Footnotes
pmh314{at}nyu.edu
rinberg{at}nyu.edu
cs5360{at}nyu.edu