Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals

The rate coding hypothesis is the oldest and still one of the most accepted hypotheses of neural coding. Consequently, many approaches have been devised for the firing rate estimation, ranging from simple binning of the time axis to advanced statistical methods. Nonetheless the concept of firing rat...

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Main Authors: Lubomir Kostal, Kristyna Kovacova
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-06-01
Series:Neuroscience Research
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168010224000853
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author Lubomir Kostal
Kristyna Kovacova
author_facet Lubomir Kostal
Kristyna Kovacova
author_sort Lubomir Kostal
collection DOAJ
description The rate coding hypothesis is the oldest and still one of the most accepted hypotheses of neural coding. Consequently, many approaches have been devised for the firing rate estimation, ranging from simple binning of the time axis to advanced statistical methods. Nonetheless the concept of firing rate, while informally understood, can be mathematically defined in several distinct ways. These definitions may yield mutually incompatible results unless implemented properly. Recently it has been shown that the notions of the instantaneous and the classical firing rates can be made compatible, at least in terms of their averages, by carefully discerning the time instant at which the neuronal activity is observed. In this paper we revisit the properties of instantaneous interspike intervals in order to derive several novel firing rate estimators, which are free of additional assumptions or parameters and their temporal resolution is ’locally self-adaptive’. The estimators are simple to implement and are numerically efficient even for very large sets of data.
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spelling doaj-art-cb5d4ed1c4394fedbc1229af12af5fea2025-08-20T01:52:42ZengElsevierNeuroscience Research0168-01022025-06-01215273610.1016/j.neures.2024.06.006Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervalsLubomir Kostal0Kristyna Kovacova1Corresponding author.; Institute of Physiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Videnska 1083, Prague 4 14200, Czech RepublicInstitute of Physiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Videnska 1083, Prague 4 14200, Czech RepublicThe rate coding hypothesis is the oldest and still one of the most accepted hypotheses of neural coding. Consequently, many approaches have been devised for the firing rate estimation, ranging from simple binning of the time axis to advanced statistical methods. Nonetheless the concept of firing rate, while informally understood, can be mathematically defined in several distinct ways. These definitions may yield mutually incompatible results unless implemented properly. Recently it has been shown that the notions of the instantaneous and the classical firing rates can be made compatible, at least in terms of their averages, by carefully discerning the time instant at which the neuronal activity is observed. In this paper we revisit the properties of instantaneous interspike intervals in order to derive several novel firing rate estimators, which are free of additional assumptions or parameters and their temporal resolution is ’locally self-adaptive’. The estimators are simple to implement and are numerically efficient even for very large sets of data.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168010224000853Spike trainFiring rateEstimatorBig data
spellingShingle Lubomir Kostal
Kristyna Kovacova
Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
Neuroscience Research
Spike train
Firing rate
Estimator
Big data
title Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
title_full Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
title_fullStr Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
title_full_unstemmed Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
title_short Estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
title_sort estimation of firing rate from instantaneous interspike intervals
topic Spike train
Firing rate
Estimator
Big data
url http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168010224000853
work_keys_str_mv AT lubomirkostal estimationoffiringratefrominstantaneousinterspikeintervals
AT kristynakovacova estimationoffiringratefrominstantaneousinterspikeintervals