1,527 research outputs found
Dynamical principles in neuroscience
Dynamical modeling of neural systems and brain functions has a history of success over the last half century. This includes, for example, the explanation and prediction of some features of neural rhythmic behaviors. Many interesting dynamical models of learning and memory based on physiological experiments have been suggested over the last two decades. Dynamical models even of consciousness now exist. Usually these models and results are based on traditional approaches and paradigms of nonlinear dynamics including dynamical chaos. Neural systems are, however, an unusual subject for nonlinear dynamics for several reasons: (i) Even the simplest neural network, with only a few neurons and synaptic connections, has an enormous number of variables and control parameters. These make neural systems adaptive and flexible, and are critical to their biological function. (ii) In contrast to traditional physical systems described by well-known basic principles, first principles governing the dynamics of neural systems are unknown. (iii) Many different neural systems exhibit similar dynamics despite having different architectures and different levels of complexity. (iv) The network architecture and connection strengths are usually not known in detail and therefore the dynamical analysis must, in some sense, be probabilistic. (v) Since nervous systems are able to organize behavior based on sensory inputs, the dynamical modeling of these systems has to explain the transformation of temporal information into combinatorial or combinatorial-temporal codes, and vice versa, for memory and recognition. In this review these problems are discussed in the context of addressing the stimulating questions: What can neuroscience learn from nonlinear dynamics, and what can nonlinear dynamics learn from neuroscience?This work was supported by NSF Grant No. NSF/EIA-0130708, and Grant No. PHY 0414174; NIH Grant No. 1 R01 NS50945 and Grant No. NS40110; MEC BFI2003-07276, and Fundación BBVA
Data-driven discovery of coordinates and governing equations
The discovery of governing equations from scientific data has the potential
to transform data-rich fields that lack well-characterized quantitative
descriptions. Advances in sparse regression are currently enabling the
tractable identification of both the structure and parameters of a nonlinear
dynamical system from data. The resulting models have the fewest terms
necessary to describe the dynamics, balancing model complexity with descriptive
ability, and thus promoting interpretability and generalizability. This
provides an algorithmic approach to Occam's razor for model discovery. However,
this approach fundamentally relies on an effective coordinate system in which
the dynamics have a simple representation. In this work, we design a custom
autoencoder to discover a coordinate transformation into a reduced space where
the dynamics may be sparsely represented. Thus, we simultaneously learn the
governing equations and the associated coordinate system. We demonstrate this
approach on several example high-dimensional dynamical systems with
low-dimensional behavior. The resulting modeling framework combines the
strengths of deep neural networks for flexible representation and sparse
identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) for parsimonious models. It is the
first method of its kind to place the discovery of coordinates and models on an
equal footing.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures; added acknowledgment
- …