The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Conceived and designed the experiments: CMG UK. Performed the experiments: CMG UK. Analyzed the data: UK BAO JSD. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: CMG UK JSD. Wrote the paper: UK JSD.
We statistically characterize the population spiking activity obtained from simultaneous recordings of neurons across all layers of a cortical microcolumn. Three types of models are compared: an Ising model which captures pairwise correlations between units, a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) which allows for modeling of higher-order correlations, and a semi-Restricted Boltzmann Machine which is a combination of Ising and RBM models. Model parameters were estimated in a fast and efficient manner using minimum probability flow, and log likelihoods were compared using annealed importance sampling. The higher-order models reveal localized activity patterns which reflect the laminar organization of neurons within a cortical column. The higher-order models also outperformed the Ising model in log-likelihood: On populations of 20 cells, the RBM had 10% higher log-likelihood (relative to an independent model) than a pairwise model, increasing to 45% gain in a larger network with 100 spatiotemporal elements, consisting of 10 neurons over 10 time steps. We further removed the need to model stimulus-induced correlations by incorporating a peri-stimulus time histogram term, in which case the higher order models continued to perform best. These results demonstrate the importance of higher-order interactions to describe the structure of correlated activity in cortical networks. Boltzmann Machines with hidden units provide a succinct and effective way to capture these dependencies without increasing the difficulty of model estimation and evaluation.
Communication between neurons underlies all perception and cognition. Hence, to understand how the brain's sensory systems such as the visual cortex work, we need to model how neurons encode and communicate information about the world. To this end, we simultaneously recorded the activity of many neurons in a cortical column, a fundamental building block of information processing in the brain. This allows us to discover statistical structure in their activity, a first step to uncovering communication pathways and coding principles. To capture the statistical structure of firing patterns, we fit models that assign a probability to each observed pattern. Fitting probability distributions is generally difficult because the model probabilities of all possible states have to sum to one, and enumerating all possible states in a large system is not possible. Making use of recent advances in parameter estimation, we are able to fit models and test the quality of the fit to the data. The resulting model parameters can be interpreted as the effective connectivity between groups of cells, thus revealing patterns of interaction between neurons in a cortical circuit.
Electrophysiology is rapidly moving towards high density recording techniques capable of capturing the simultaneous activity of large populations of neurons. This raises the challenge of understanding how networks encode and process information in ways that go beyond tuning properties or feedforward receptive field models. Modeling the distribution of states in a network provides a way to discover communication patterns between neurons or functional groupings such as cell assemblies which may exhibit a more direct relation to stimulus or behavioral variables.
The Ising model, originally developed in the 1920s to describe magnetic interactions
In this work, we apply maximum entropy models to neural population recordings from the visual cortex. Cortical networks have proven more challenging to model than the retina: The magnitude and importance of pairwise correlations between cortical cells is controversial
Estimating the parameters of energy-based models, to which Ising models and Boltzmann machines belong, is computationally hard because these models cannot be normalized in closed form. For both Ising models and Boltzmann machines with hidden units, the normalization constant is intractable to compute, consisting of a sum over the exponential number of states of the system. This makes exact maximum likelihood estimation impossible for all but the smallest systems and necessitates approximate or computationally expensive estimation methods. In this work, we use Minimum Probability Flow (MPF
Another challenge in using energy-based models is the evaluation of their likelihood after fitting to the data, which is again made difficult due to the partition function. To compute probabilities and compare the likelihood of different models, annealed importance sampling (AIS)
Combining these two methods for model estimation and evaluation, we show that with hidden units, Boltzmann machines can capture the distribution of states in a microcolumn of cat visual cortex significantly better than an Ising model without hidden units. The higher-order structure discovered by the model is spatially organized and specific to cortical layers, indicating that common input or recurrent connectivity within individual layers of a microcolumn are the dominant source of correlations. Applied to spatiotemporal patterns of activity, the model captures temporal structure in addition to dependencies across different cells, allowing us to predict spiking activity based on the history of the network.
We estimated Ising, RBM and sRBM models for populations of cortical cells simultaneously recorded across all cortical layers in a microcolumn of cat V1 in response to long, continuous natural movies presented at a frame rate of 150 Hz. Code for the model estimation is available for download at
(
The estimated model parameters for the three different types of models (Ising, RBM and sRBM) are shown in
The horizontal lines indicate approximate boundaries between cortical layers II/III, layer IV and layers V/VI. (
In (b) we show the hidden units of the RBM as individual bar plots, with the bars representing connection strengths to visible units. The topmost bar corresponds to the hidden bias of the unit, and hidden units are ordered from highest to lowest variance. The units are highly selective in connectivity: The first unit almost exclusively connects to cells in the deep (granular and subgranular) cortical layers. The second unit captures correlations between cells in the superficial (supergranular) layers. The correlations are of high order, with 10 and more cells receiving input from a hidden unit. The remaining units connect fewer cells, but still tend to be location-specific. Only the hidden units that have non-zero couplings are shown. Additional hidden units are turned off by the
The sRBM combines both pairwise and hidden connections and hence is visualized with a pairwise coupling matrix and bar plots for hidden units. With the larger number of parameters, the best model is even more sparse in the number of nonzero parameters. The remaining pairwise terms predominantly encode negative interactions, and much of the positive coupling has been explained away by the hidden units. These give rise to strong positive couplings within either superficial (II/III) or intermediate (IV) and deep (V/VI) layers, which explain the majority of structure in the data. The more succinct explanation for dependencies between recorded neurons is via connections to shared hidden units, rather than direct couplings between visible units. The RBM and sRBM in this comparison were both estimated with 22 hidden units, but we show only units that did not turn off entirely due to the sparseness penalty. In this example, a sparseness penalty of
In order to ascertain to what degree the stimulus driven component of activity accounts for the learned higher-order correlations, we augmented the above models with a dynamic bias term that consists of the log of the average instantaneous firing probability of each cell over repeated presentations of the same stimulus. In the case that all trained parameters were zero, this model would assign a firing probability to all neurons identical to that in the peri-stimulus time histogram (PSTH).
In
For a quantitative comparison between models, we computed normalized likelihoods using Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) to estimate the partition function. For each model, we generated 500 samples through a chain of
Likelihoods are normalized to bits/spike to account for different population size as well as firing rate. (
Each of the models was estimated for a range of sparseness parameters
Additional insight into the relative performance of the models can be gained by comparing model probabilities to empirical probabilities for the various types of patterns.
Different models are distinguished by color, the number of simultaneously spiking cells in each pattern by different symbols. (
Note that any error in estimating the partition function of the models would lead to a vertical offset of all points. Thus visually checking the alignment of the data cloud around the identity line provides a visual verification that there are no catastrophic errors in the estimation of the partition function. Unfortunately we cannot use this alignment as a shortcut to compute the partition function without sampling, e.g. by defining
The same models can be used to capture spatiotemporal patterns by treating previous time steps as additional cells. Consecutive network states binned at 6.7 ms were concatenated in blocks of up to 13 time steps, for a total network dimensionality of 130 with 10 cells. These models were cross-validated and the sparseness parameters optimized in the same way as for the instantaneous model. This allows us to learn kernels that describe the temporal structure of interactions between cells.
In
Spatiotemporal models with 10 cells and a varying number of concatenated time steps. The log-likelihood per spike increases as each neuron is modeled as part of a longer time sequence. This effect holds both for Ising and higher-order models. Since the Ising model cannot capture many of the relevant dependencies, the increase in likelihood saturates after about 3 timesteps for the Ising model, but continues to increase for the higher-order models. Insert: Comparison of the entropy per time slice for Ising and RBM models as a function of model size. As the RBM is better able to model spatiotemporal dependencies, the additional entropy for extra frames is smaller than for the Ising models. The RBM does not reach the point of extensivity, where additional frames add constant entropy. Multiple lines of the same color indicate repeated runs with different random initialization.
The insert in the figure shows the entropy of the models, normalized by the data dimensionality by dividing by the number of frames and neurons. The entropy was computed as
A similar observation has been made in
To predict spiking based on the network history, we can compute the conditional distribution of single units given the state of the rest of the network. This is illustrated for a network with 15 time steps for a dimensionality of 150. This model is not included in the above likelihood comparison, as the AIS normalization becomes very expensive for this model size.
(
By conditioning the probability of one cell at one time bin on the state of the remaining network, we can compute how much information about a cell is captured by the model over a naive prediction based on the firing rate of the cell. This conditional likelihood for each cell is plotted in
While there has been a resurgence of interest in Ising-like maximum entropy models for describing neural data, progress has been hampered mainly by two problems. First, estimation of energy based models is difficult since these models cannot be normalized in closed form. Evaluating the likelihood of the model thus requires approximations or a numerical integral over the exponential number of states of the model, making maximum likelihood estimation computationally intractable. Even the pairwise Ising model is typically intractable to estimate, and various approximations are required to overcome this problem. Second, the number of model parameters to be estimated grows very rapidly with neural population size. If correlations up to
We attempted to address both of these problems here. Parameter estimation was made tractable using MPF, and latent variables were shown to be an effective way of capturing high order dependencies. This addresses several shortcomings that have been identified with the Ising model.
As argued in
Another shortcoming of the Ising model and some previous extensions is that the number of parameters to be estimated does not scale favorably with the dimensionality of the network. The number of pairwise coupling terms in GLM and Ising models scales with the square of the number of neurons, so with the amounts of data typically collected in electrophysiological experiments it is only possible to identify the parameters for small networks with a few tens of cells. This problem is aggravated by including higher-order couplings: for example the number of third order coupling parameters scales with the cube of the data dimensionality. Therefore attempting to estimate these coupling parameters directly is a daunting task that usually requires approximations and strong regularization.
Early attempts at modeling higher-order structure side-stepped these technical issues by focussing on structure in very small networks. Ohiorhenuan noted that Ising models fail to explain structure in cat visual cortex
Given that higher-order correlations are important to include in statistical models of neural activity, the question turns to how these models can be estimated for larger data sets. In this section, we focus on two approaches that are complementary to our model using hidden units. The increasing role of higher-order correlations in larger networks was first observed in
Therefore they address the same question as the present paper, i.e. how to capture
The second alternative to the RBM with hidden units is to include additional low-dimensional constraints in an Ising model. In the “K-pairwise” model
In addition to proposing a faster (though slower than MPF) parameter estimation method for this class of models, Tkačik and colleagues address the difficulty in sampling from the model and computing the partition function. In our experiments the overall limiting factor is the Gibbs sampler in the AIS partition function estimation. Tkačik et al. use a more efficient sampling algorithm (Wang-Landau) to compute partition functions and entropy of their models. As an even simpler approach to the partition function problem, they suggest that it can be obtained in closed form if the empirical probability of at least one pattern in the data is accurately known. A case in point is the all zeros pattern that is typically frequent for recordings with sparsely firing neurons. Unfortunately, this approach is limited in that it assumes that the probability the model assigns to the state is identical to the empirical probability of the state. In the case that the model has not been perfectly fit to the data, or in the case that the data does not belong to the model class, this will lead to an incorrect estimate of the partition function.
Since the activity we are modeling is in response to a specific stimulus, one may rightfully question whether the observed higher-order correlations in neural activity are simply due to higher-order structure contained in the stimulus, as opposed to being an emergent property of cortical networks. In an attempt to tease apart the contribution of the stimulus, we included a nonparametric PSTH term in the model. However, this can capture arbitrarily complex stimulus transformations using the trial-averaged response to predict the response to a new repetition of the same stimulus. As an “oracle model”, it does not only capture the part of the response that could be attributed to a feed-forward receptive field, but also captures contextual modulation effects mediated by surrounding columns and feedback from higher brain areas, essentially making it “too good” as a stimulus model. The RBM and Ising models are then relegated to merely explain the trial to trial variability in our experiments. Not including stimulus terms and finding the best model to explain the correlations present in the data, irrespective of whether they are due to stimulus or correlated variability, seems to be an equally valid approach to discover functional connectivity in the population.
GLMs
The RBM provides a parsimonious model for higher-order dependencies in neural population data. Without explicitly enumerating a potentially exponential number of coupling terms or being constrained by only measurements of pairwise correlations, it provides a low-dimensional, physiologically interpretable model that can be easily estimated for populations of 100 or more cells.
The connectivity patterns the RBM learns from cells simultaneously recorded from all cortical layers are spatially localized, showing that small neural assemblies within cortical layers are strongly coupled. This suggests that cells within a layer perform similar computations on common input, while cells across different cortical layers participate in distinct computations and have much less coupled activity. This novel observation is made possible by the RBM: because each of the hidden units responds to (and therefore learns on) a large number of recorded patterns, it can capture dependencies that are too weak to extract with previous models. In particular, the connectivity patterns discovered by the RBM and sRBM are by no means obvious from the covariance of the data or by inspecting the coupling matrix of the Ising model. This approach, combining a straightforward estimation procedure and a powerful model, can be extended from polytrode recordings to capture physiologically meaningful connectivity patterns in other types of multi-electrode data.
The protocol used in the experiments was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Montana State University and conformed to the guidelines recommended in Preparation and Maintenance of Higher Mammals During Neuroscience Experiments, National Institutes of Health Publication 913207 (National Institutes of Heath, Bethesda, MD 1991).
Three movies of 8, 20 and 30 minutes duration were captured at 300 frames per second and
Data were recorded from anesthetized cat visual cortex in response to a custom set of full field natural movie stimuli. The surgical methods are described in detail elsewhere
For spike sorting, the 32 polytrode channels were treated as 8 non-overlapping groups, shown in Fig. S 2a). To each group, a standard tetrode spike sorting method was applied
(
To register individual recording channels with cortical layers, recording locations were reconstructed from Nissl-stained histological sections, and current source density (CSD) analysis in response to 100 repetitions of a full-field stimulus flashed at 1 Hz was used to infer the location of cortical layer IV on the polytrode
The models were estimated on a data set of
For the stimulus dependent model, a separate data set of
We also analyzed spatiotemporal patterns of data, which were created by concatenating consecutive state vectors. For the spatiotemporal experiments a bin width of 6.7 ms, corresponding to the frame rate of the stimulus, was used. This bin size is a compromise capturing more detailed structure in the data without leading to an undue increase in dimensionality and complexity. Up to 13 time bins were concatenated in order to discover spatiotemporal patterns and predict spiking given the history over the prior 87 ms. These models were trained on
The sRBM consists of a set of binary visible units
The Ising model with visible-visible coupling weights
The RBM with visible-hidden coupling weights
This step gives a standard energy-based model which we can estimate in our framework, while in a fully connected Boltzmann machine we could not marginalize over hidden units, making the estimation intractable. The energy for the marginalized distribution over
As with the RBM, it is straightforward to marginalize over the hidden units for an sRBM,
A hierarchical Markov Random Field based on the sRBM has previously been applied as a model for natural image patches
To include stimulus effects into the Boltzmann machine models, we start with a maximum entropy model constrained to fit the peri-stimulus time histogram (PSTH), i.e. the response to a given stimulus obtained by empirically computing the firing probabilities averaged over repeated presentations. This non-parametric model has the form
Instead of CD, which is based on sampling, we train the models using Minimum Probability Flow (MPF,
To prevent overfitting all models were estimated with an
Since MPF learning does not give an estimate of the partition function, for models that were too large to normalize by summing over all states, we use annealed importance sampling (AIS,
Normalizing the distribution via AIS allows us to compute the log likelihood of the model
The excess log likelihood rate
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