A nonparametric approach to extract information from interspike interval data

In this work we develop an approach to extracting information from neural spike trains. Using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, interspike interval data from experiments and simulations are fitted by mixtures of distributions, including Gamma, inverse Gaussian, log-normal, and the distribution of the interspike intervals of the leaky integrate-and-fire model. In terms of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for goodness-of-fit, our approach is proved successful (P > 0.05) in fitting benchmark data for which a classical parametric approach has been shown to fail before. In addition, we present a novel method to fit mixture models to censored data, and discuss two examples of the application of such a method, which correspond to the case of multiple-trial and multielectrode array data. A MATLAB implementation of the algorithm is available for download from http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/er28/em/.