05594259

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05594259 Watanabe, Kazuho Okada, Masato Firing rate estimation using an approximate Bayesian method. K\"oppen, Mario (ed.) et al., Advances in neuro-information processing. 15th international conference, ICONIP 2008, Auckland, New Zealand, November 25--28, 2008. Revised selected papers, Part I. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-02489-4/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5506, 655-662 (2009). 2009 Berlin: Springer EN

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02490-0_80

Summary: Bayesian estimation methods are used for estimation of an event rate (firing rate) from a series of event (spike) times. Generally, however, the computation of the Bayesian posterior distribution involves an analytically intractable integration. An event rate is defined in a very high dimensional space, which makes it computationally demanding to obtain the Bayesian posterior distribution of the rate. We consider the estimation of the firing rate underlying behind a sequence that represents the counts of spikes. We derive an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm for it, which enables the analytical calculation of the posterior distribution. We also provide a method to estimate the prior hyperparameter which determines the smoothness of the estimated firing rate.