Sparse Estimation of Spike-Triggered Average

Abstract

The spike-triggered average (STA) and phase response curve characterize the response properties of single neurons. A recent theoretical study proposed a method to estimate the phase response curve by means of linear regression with Fourier basis functions. In this study, we propose a method to estimate the STA by means of sparse linear regression with Fourier and polynomial basis functions. In the proposed method, we use sparse estimation with L1 regularization to extract substantial basis functions for the STA. We show using simulated data that the proposed method achieves more accurate estimation of the STA than the simple trial average used in conventional method.