Print Email Facebook Twitter The role of pairwise and higher-order correlations in feedforward inputs to neural networks Title The role of pairwise and higher-order correlations in feedforward inputs to neural networks Author Hübner, D. Contributor Kumar, A. (mentor) Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Applied mathematics Programme Computer Simulation for Science and Engineering Date 2015-10-08 Abstract When presented with a task or stimulus, the ongoing activity in the brain is perturbed in order to process the new information of the environment. Typical characteristics of this evoked activity are (1) an increase in firing rate of neurons, (2) a decrease in trial-by-trial variability and (3) an increase or decrease in spike count correlations. Considering the importance of variability and correlations within the rate coding paradigm, it is crucial to understand the origin of these modulations. Different networks in the brain are typically connected through divergent-convergent connections. In a recent work, the correlations in the convergent connections of the feed-forward input have been found to be able to reproduce the above characteristics. This thesis expands this work by also considering correlations in the divergent connections. Through large-scale network simulations, we can show that correlations in the divergent connections have a significant impact on the output correlation coefficient and a small impact on the output firing rate. Moreover, we investigate the question whether keeping the pairwise correlations constant and varying the higher-order correlation structure can influence the network dynamics. We find that this influence is very small suggesting that higher-order correlations in the divergence connections carry only a limited amount of information. These findings can significantly simplify the analysis of neural data. Subject computational neurosciencehigher order correlationsfeedforwardneural networks To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:90f2385d-dcdf-4e58-8899-aa81fb6ff782 Embargo date 2015-11-17 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2015 Hübner, D. Files PDF main.pdf 2.69 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:90f2385d-dcdf-4e58-8899-aa81fb6ff782/datastream/OBJ/view