5,864 research outputs found
Measuring information-transfer delays
In complex networks such as gene networks, traffic systems or brain circuits it is important to understand how long it takes for the different parts of the network to effectively influence one another. In the brain, for example, axonal delays between brain areas can amount to several tens of milliseconds, adding an intrinsic component to any timing-based processing of information. Inferring neural interaction delays is thus needed to interpret the information transfer revealed by any analysis of directed interactions across brain structures. However, a robust estimation of interaction delays from neural activity faces several challenges if modeling assumptions on interaction mechanisms are wrong or cannot be made. Here, we propose a robust estimator for neuronal interaction delays rooted in an information-theoretic framework, which allows a model-free exploration of interactions. In particular, we extend transfer entropy to account for delayed source-target interactions, while crucially retaining the conditioning on the embedded target state at the immediately previous time step. We prove that this particular extension is indeed guaranteed to identify interaction delays between two coupled systems and is the only relevant option in keeping with Wiener’s principle of causality. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in detecting interaction delays on finite data by numerical simulations of stochastic and deterministic processes, as well as on local field potential recordings. We also show the ability of the extended transfer entropy to detect the presence of multiple delays, as well as feedback loops. While evaluated on neuroscience data, we expect the estimator to be useful in other fields dealing with network dynamics
Group Iterative Spectrum Thresholding for Super-Resolution Sparse Spectral Selection
Recently, sparsity-based algorithms are proposed for super-resolution
spectrum estimation. However, to achieve adequately high resolution in
real-world signal analysis, the dictionary atoms have to be close to each other
in frequency, thereby resulting in a coherent design. The popular convex
compressed sensing methods break down in presence of high coherence and large
noise. We propose a new regularization approach to handle model collinearity
and obtain parsimonious frequency selection simultaneously. It takes advantage
of the pairing structure of sine and cosine atoms in the frequency dictionary.
A probabilistic spectrum screening is also developed for fast computation in
high dimensions. A data-resampling version of high-dimensional Bayesian
Information Criterion is used to determine the regularization parameters.
Experiments show the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed algorithms in
challenging situations with small sample size, high frequency resolution, and
low signal-to-noise ratio
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