An increasing number of projects in neuroscience requires the statistical analysis of high dimensional data sets, as, for instance, in predicting behavior from neural firing or in operating artificial devices from brain recordings in brain-machine interfaces. Linear analysis techniques remain prevalent in such cases, but classical linear regression approaches are often numerically too fragile in high dimensions. In this paper, we address the question of whether EMG data collected from arm movements of monkeys can be faithfully reconstructed with linear approaches from neural activity in primary motor cortex (M1). To achieve robust data analysis, we develop a full Bayesian approach to linear regression that automatically detects and excludes irrelevant features in the data, regularizing against overfitting. In comparison with ordinary least squares, stepwise regression, partial least squares, LASSO regression and a brute force combinatorial search for the most predictive input features in the data, we demonstrate that the new Bayesian method offers a superior mixture of characteristics in terms of regularization against overfitting, computational efficiency and ease of use, demonstrating its potential as a drop-in replacement for other linear regression techniques. As neuroscientific results, our analyses demonstrate that EMG data can be well predicted from M1 neurons, further opening the path for possible real-time interfaces between brains and machines.

Spiking activity from neurophysiological experiments often exhibits dynamics beyond that driven by external stimulation, presumably reflecting the extensive recurrence of neural circuitry. Characterizing these dynamics may reveal important features of neural computation, particularly during internally-driven cognitive operations. For example, the activity of premotor cortex (PMd) neurons during an instructed delay period separating movement-target specification and a movementinitiation cue is believed to be involved in motor planning. We show that the dynamics underlying this activity can be captured by a lowdimensional nonlinear dynamical systems model, with underlying recurrent structure and stochastic point-process output.

We describe a neuromorphic chip that uses binary synapses with spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) to learn stimulated patterns of activity and to compensate for variability in excitability. Specifically, STDP preferentially potentiates (turns on) synapses that project from excitable neurons, which spike early, to lethargic neurons, which spike late. The additional excitatory synaptic current makes lethargic neurons spike earlier, thereby causing neurons that belong to the same pattern to spike in synchrony. Once learned, an entire pattern can be recalled by stimulating a subset.

Long-distance language modeling is important not only in speech recognition and machine translation, but also in high-dimensional discrete sequence modeling in general. However, the problem of context length has almost been neglected so far and a naïve bag-of-words history has been employed in natural language processing. In contrast, in this paper we view topic shifts within a text as a latent stochastic process to give an explicit probabilistic generative model that has partial exchangeability. We propose an online inference algorithm using particle filters to recognize topic shifts to employ the most appropriate length of context automatically. Experiments on the BNC corpus showed consistent improvement over previous methods involving no chronological order.

We propose consensus propagation, an asynchronous distributed protocol for averaging numbers across a network. We establish convergence, characterize the convergence rate for regular graphs, and demonstrate that the protocol exhibits better scaling properties than pairwise averaging, an alternative that has received much recent attention. Consensus propagation can be viewed as a special case of belief propagation, and our results contribute to the belief propagation literature. In particular, beyond singly-connected graphs, there are very few classes of relevant problems for which belief propagation is known to converge.

The category of visual stimuli has been reliably decoded from patterns of neural activity in extrastriate visual cortex [1]. It has yet to be seen whether object identity can be inferred from this activity. We present fMRI data measuring responses in human extrastriate cortex to a set of 12 distinct object images. We use a simple winner-take-all classifier, using half the data from each recording session as a training set, to evaluate encoding of object identity across fMRI voxels. Since this approach is sensitive to the inclusion of noisy voxels, we describe two methods for identifying subsets of voxels in the data which optimally distinguish object identity. One method characterizes the reliability of each voxel within subsets of the data, while another estimates the mutual information of each voxel with the stimulus set. We find that both metrics can identify subsets of the data which reliably encode object identity, even when noisy measurements are artificially added to the data. The mutual information metric is less efficient at this task, likely due to constraints in fMRI data.

We measure the ability of human observers to predict the next datum in a sequence that is generated by a simple statistical process undergoing change at random points in time. Accurate performance in this task requires the identification of changepoints. We assess individual differences between observers both empirically, and using two kinds of models: a Bayesian approach for change detection and a family of cognitively plausible fast and frugal models. Some individuals detect too many changes and hence perform sub-optimally due to excess variability. Other individuals do not detect enough changes, and perform sub-optimally because they fail to notice short-term temporal trends.

We extend radial basis function (RBF) networks to the scenario in which multiple correlated tasks are learned simultaneously, and present the corresponding learning algorithms. We develop the algorithms for learning the network structure, in either a supervised or unsupervised manner. Training data may also be actively selected to improve the network's generalization to test data. Experimental results based on real data demonstrate the advantage of the proposed algorithms and support our conclusions.

Nonnegative matrix approximation (NNMA) is a recent technique for dimensionality reduction and data analysis that yields a parts based, sparse nonnegative representation for nonnegative input data. NNMA has found a wide variety of applications, including text analysis, document clustering, face/image recognition, language modeling, speech processing and many others. Despite these numerous applications, the algorithmic development for computing the NNMA factors has been relatively deficient. This paper makes algorithmic progress by modeling and solving (using multiplicative updates) new generalized NNMA problems that minimize Bregman divergences between the input matrix and its lowrank approximation. The multiplicative update formulae in the pioneering work by Lee and Seung [11] arise as a special case of our algorithms. In addition, the paper shows how to use penalty functions for incorporating constraints other than nonnegativity into the problem. Further, some interesting extensions to the use of "link" functions for modeling nonlinear relationships are also discussed.

This paper presents a new filter for online data association problems in high-dimensional spaces. The key innovation is a representation of the data association posterior in information form, in which the "proximity" of objects and tracks are expressed by numerical links. Updating these links requires linear time, compared to exponential time required for computing the exact posterior probabilities. The paper derives the algorithm formally and provides comparative results using data obtained by a real-world camera array and by a large-scale sensor network simulation.