Annealed Importance Sampling for Neural Mass Models.

Neural Mass Models provide a compact description of the dynamical activity of cell populations in neocortical regions. Moreover, models of regional activity can be connected together into networks, and inferences made about the strength of connections, using M/EEG data and Bayesian inference. To dat...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Will Penny, Biswa Sengupta
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2016-03-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004797&type=printable
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Summary:Neural Mass Models provide a compact description of the dynamical activity of cell populations in neocortical regions. Moreover, models of regional activity can be connected together into networks, and inferences made about the strength of connections, using M/EEG data and Bayesian inference. To date, however, Bayesian methods have been largely restricted to the Variational Laplace (VL) algorithm which assumes that the posterior distribution is Gaussian and finds model parameters that are only locally optimal. This paper explores the use of Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) to address these restrictions. We implement AIS using proposals derived from Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) which uses local gradient and curvature information for efficient exploration of parameter space. In terms of the estimation of Bayes factors, VL and AIS agree about which model is best but report different degrees of belief. Additionally, AIS finds better model parameters and we find evidence of non-Gaussianity in their posterior distribution.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358