iSTTC: A robust method for accurate estimation of intrinsic neural timescales from single-unit recordings
Fig 7
iSTTC provides more stable, robust and inclusive IT estimates than ACF and PearsonR also on experimental data.
(A) Schematic representation of Neuropixels recordings from the six visual cortical areas (V1, LM, RL, AL, PM, AM) and the two thalamic areas (LGN and LP), image source [2] (left), violin plots displaying the single units firing rate (top right) and local variation (bottom right). Mouse icon from scidraw.io (DOI https://zenodo.org/records/3925991). (B) Scatter plots displaying ITs at the brain area level. Black dots indicate area-level ITs used for the analyses in S12B–S12D Fig. Grey dots represent individual brain-area IT estimates for the trial-based methods across different sampling iterations (n = 50 samples). (C) Violin plots displaying the estimated ITs (n = 3053 single units, only units for which all methods produced an IT estimate are included) as a function of the estimation method (left). Violin plots displaying pseudo-REE as a function of the estimation method (middle). Scatter plot displaying the percentage of spike trains with pseudo-REE falling within progressively narrower bounds (right). (D) Line plot displaying predicted pseudo-REE values for iSTTC and ACF as a function of signal length (n = 5674 single units per signal length, only units for which both methods produced an IT estimate for all signal lengths are included). Shaded areas represent 95% confidence intervals. Y-axes are plotted on a scale. (E) Heatmap displaying the percentage of spike trains with pseudo-REE within specific intervals for ACF (left) and iSTTC (middle) across varying signal lengths. Color codes for the proportion of spike trains, with warmer colors indicating higher percentages of spike trains. (Right) Heatmap displaying the difference between ACF and iSTTC. Negative values indicate better performance (lower pseudo-REE) for iSTTC. Color codes for the magnitude of the difference. (F) Same as (D) for PearsonR and iSTTC (n = 4588 single units per number of trials, only units for which both methods produced an IT estimate for all numbers of trials are included). (G) Same as (E) for PearsonR and iSTTC. In (B)–(G), ACF/PearsonR parameters were: bin size = 50 ms, number of lags = 20; iSTTC parameters were: lag shift = 50 ms, dt = 25 ms, number of lags = 20. In (A) and (C) left and middle, data is presented as median, 25th, 75th percentile, and interquartile range, with the shaded area representing the probability density distribution of the variable.In (C), asterisks indicate a significant effect of the method. In (C) left, ACF is used as a reference. In (C) middle, PearsonR is used as a reference. In (D), asterisks indicate a significant effect of signal length. **
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. Generalized linear models with interactions (C), (D), and (F).