Papers › Variational Latent Gaussian Process for Recovering Single-Trial Dynamics from...
Variational Latent Gaussian Process for Recovering Single-Trial Dynamics from Population Spike Trains
Yuan Zhao, Il Memming Park
When governed by underlying low-dimensional dynamics, the interdependence of simultaneously recorded population of neurons can be explained by a small number of shared factors, or a low-dimensional trajectory. Recovering these latent trajectories, particularly from single-trial population recordings, may help us understand the dynamics that drive neural computation. However, due to the biophysical constraints and noise in the spike trains, inferring trajectories from data is a challenging statistical problem in general. Here, we propose a practical and efficient inference method, called the variational latent Gaussian process (vLGP). The vLGP combines a generative model with a history-dependent point process observation together with a smoothness prior on the latent trajectories. The vLGP improves upon earlier methods for recovering latent trajectories, which assume either observation models inappropriate for point processes or linear dynamics. We compare and validate vLGP on both simulated datasets and population recordings from the primary visual cortex. In the V1 dataset, we find that vLGP achieves substantially higher performance than previous methods for predicting omitted spike trains, as well as capturing both the toroidal topology of visual stimuli space, and the noise-correlation. These results show that vLGP is a robust method with a potential to reveal hidden neural dynamics from large-scale neural recordings.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections