Gibbs distribution analysis of temporal correlations structure in retina ganglion cells

Abstract

We present a method to estimate Gibbs distributions with spatio-temporal constraints on spike trains statistics. We apply this method to spike trains recorded from ganglion cells of the salamander retina, in response to natural movies. Our analysis, restricted to a few neurons, performs more accurately than pairwise synchronization models (Ising) or the 1-time step Markov models (Marre et al. (2009)) to describe the statistics of spatio-temporal spike patterns and emphasizes the role of higher order spatio-temporal interactions.