Simulation Based Inference of a Simple Neural Network Structure

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Hauptverfasser: Charitat, Pierre, Geffray, Ségolen, Pouzat, Christophe
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Charitat, Pierre
Geffray, Ségolen
Pouzat, Christophe
author_facet Charitat, Pierre
Geffray, Ségolen
Pouzat, Christophe
contents Neurophysiologists are nowadays able to record from a large number of extracellular electrodes and to extract, from the raw data, the sequences of action potentials or spikes generated by many neurons. Unfortunately these ''many neurons'' still represent only a tiny fraction of the neuronal population that constitutes the network. Using association statistics such as the estimation of the cross-correlation functions, they are trying to infer the structure of the network formed by the recorded neurons. But this inference is compromised by the tremendous under-sampling of the neuronal population. We propose to focus instead on simple spike train statistics, like the empirical spikes frequency, or the interspike interval distribution. Their sampling distributions can be estimated by simulations, and, given a few observed spike train statistics, they provide enough information to infer the structure of the underlying network. We show that, on a ''toy model'', our method gives significantly better results than the sub-network reconstruction method with regards to the inference of the connection probability of the original network.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulation Based Inference of a Simple Neural Network Structure
Charitat, Pierre
Geffray, Ségolen
Pouzat, Christophe
Applications
Neurons and Cognition
Neurophysiologists are nowadays able to record from a large number of extracellular electrodes and to extract, from the raw data, the sequences of action potentials or spikes generated by many neurons. Unfortunately these ''many neurons'' still represent only a tiny fraction of the neuronal population that constitutes the network. Using association statistics such as the estimation of the cross-correlation functions, they are trying to infer the structure of the network formed by the recorded neurons. But this inference is compromised by the tremendous under-sampling of the neuronal population. We propose to focus instead on simple spike train statistics, like the empirical spikes frequency, or the interspike interval distribution. Their sampling distributions can be estimated by simulations, and, given a few observed spike train statistics, they provide enough information to infer the structure of the underlying network. We show that, on a ''toy model'', our method gives significantly better results than the sub-network reconstruction method with regards to the inference of the connection probability of the original network.
title Simulation Based Inference of a Simple Neural Network Structure
topic Applications
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18599