Reviews: Approximate Bayesian Inference for a Mechanistic Model of Vesicle Release at a Ribbon Synapse

Neural Information Processing Systems 

The author responses answered my questions as well as points raised by other reviewers, providing additional clarification.] This paper formulates a fully probabilistic model of the vesicle-release dynamics at the sub-cellular biophysical level in the ribbon synapse. The paper then develops a likelihood-free inference method, tests it on a synthetic dataset, and finally infers the parameters of vesicle release in the ribbon synapse from real data. Originality: The paper presents a novel combination of biophysical modeling of ribbon synapse and a likelihood-free inference of the parameters. To my knowledge, the fully stochastic modeling of the vesicle-release dynamics is itself new.