38,486 research outputs found
Taking Synchrony Seriously: A Perceptual-Level Model of Infant Synchrony Detection
Synchrony detection between different sensory and/or motor channels appears critically important for young infant learning and cognitive development. For example, empirical studies demonstrate that audio-visual synchrony aids in language acquisition. In this paper we compare these infant studies with a model of synchrony detection based on the Hershey and Movellan (2000) algorithm augmented with methods for quantitative synchrony estimation. Four infant-model comparisons are presented, using audio-visual stimuli of increasing complexity. While infants and the model showed learning or discrimination with each type of stimuli used, the model was most successful with stimuli comprised of one audio and one visual source, and also with two audio sources and a dynamic-face visual motion source. More difficult for the model were stimuli conditions with two motion sources, and more abstract visual dynamics—an oscilloscope instead of a face. Future research should model the developmental pathway of synchrony detection. Normal audio-visual synchrony detection in infants may be experience-dependent (e.g., Bergeson, et al., 2004)
Mutual Information in Frequency and its Application to Measure Cross-Frequency Coupling in Epilepsy
We define a metric, mutual information in frequency (MI-in-frequency), to
detect and quantify the statistical dependence between different frequency
components in the data, referred to as cross-frequency coupling and apply it to
electrophysiological recordings from the brain to infer cross-frequency
coupling. The current metrics used to quantify the cross-frequency coupling in
neuroscience cannot detect if two frequency components in non-Gaussian brain
recordings are statistically independent or not. Our MI-in-frequency metric,
based on Shannon's mutual information between the Cramer's representation of
stochastic processes, overcomes this shortcoming and can detect statistical
dependence in frequency between non-Gaussian signals. We then describe two
data-driven estimators of MI-in-frequency: one based on kernel density
estimation and the other based on the nearest neighbor algorithm and validate
their performance on simulated data. We then use MI-in-frequency to estimate
mutual information between two data streams that are dependent across time,
without making any parametric model assumptions. Finally, we use the MI-in-
frequency metric to investigate the cross-frequency coupling in seizure onset
zone from electrocorticographic recordings during seizures. The inferred
cross-frequency coupling characteristics are essential to optimize the spatial
and spectral parameters of electrical stimulation based treatments of epilepsy.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Signal
Processing and contains 15 pages, 9 figures and 1 tabl
Estimating Entropy of Data Streams Using Compressed Counting
The Shannon entropy is a widely used summary statistic, for example, network
traffic measurement, anomaly detection, neural computations, spike trains, etc.
This study focuses on estimating Shannon entropy of data streams. It is known
that Shannon entropy can be approximated by Reenyi entropy or Tsallis entropy,
which are both functions of the p-th frequency moments and approach Shannon
entropy as p->1.
Compressed Counting (CC) is a new method for approximating the p-th frequency
moments of data streams. Our contributions include:
1) We prove that Renyi entropy is (much) better than Tsallis entropy for
approximating Shannon entropy.
2) We propose the optimal quantile estimator for CC, which considerably
improves the previous estimators.
3) Our experiments demonstrate that CC is indeed highly effective
approximating the moments and entropies. We also demonstrate the crucial
importance of utilizing the variance-bias trade-off
Brain covariance selection: better individual functional connectivity models using population prior
Spontaneous brain activity, as observed in functional neuroimaging, has been
shown to display reproducible structure that expresses brain architecture and
carries markers of brain pathologies. An important view of modern neuroscience
is that such large-scale structure of coherent activity reflects modularity
properties of brain connectivity graphs. However, to date, there has been no
demonstration that the limited and noisy data available in spontaneous activity
observations could be used to learn full-brain probabilistic models that
generalize to new data. Learning such models entails two main challenges: i)
modeling full brain connectivity is a difficult estimation problem that faces
the curse of dimensionality and ii) variability between subjects, coupled with
the variability of functional signals between experimental runs, makes the use
of multiple datasets challenging. We describe subject-level brain functional
connectivity structure as a multivariate Gaussian process and introduce a new
strategy to estimate it from group data, by imposing a common structure on the
graphical model in the population. We show that individual models learned from
functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data using this population prior
generalize better to unseen data than models based on alternative
regularization schemes. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a
cross-validated model of spontaneous brain activity. Finally, we use the
estimated graphical model to explore the large-scale characteristics of
functional architecture and show for the first time that known cognitive
networks appear as the integrated communities of functional connectivity graph.Comment: in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver :
Canada (2010
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