Section: New Software and Platforms
ENAS
Event Neural Assembly Simulation
Keywords: Neurosciences - Health - Physiology
Functional Description Enas is a software for the analysis of spike trains either coming from neural simulators or from biological experiments. Spike trains statistical analysis is based on the estimation of a Gibbs distribution with a spatio-temporal potential optimaly characterizing the statistics of empirical spike trains by minimisation of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the empirical measure and the Gibbs measure. From this, classical statistical indicators such as firing rate, correlations, higher order moments statistical entropy, effective connectivity graph, confidence plots and so on are obtained. Also, the form of the Gibbs potential provides essential informations on the underlying neural network and its structure. This method does not only allows us to estimate the spikes statistics but also to compare different models, thus answering such questions about the neural code as, e.g., are correlations (or time synchrony or a given set of spike patterns, etc.) significant with respect to rate coding? The software includes classical Maximum Entropy Models such as Ising model, but also more general forms of potentials with spatio-temporal interactions. It also has a functionality attempting to guess the shape of the potential from data and a procedure fitting an Integrate and Fire Neural Network reproducing the empirical rasters statistics. Finally, it allows to generate artificial rasters having a given distribution (e.g. corresponding to biological spike trains).