Identifyingsignalandnoisestructureinneural populationactivitywithGaussianprocessfactor models

Neural datasets often contain measurements of neural activity across multiple trials of a repeated stimulus or behavior. An important problem in the analysis ofsuch datasets istocharacterizesystematic aspects ofneural activity that carry information about the repeated stimulus or behavior of interest, which can be considered "signal", and to separate them from the trial-to-trial fluctuations in activity that are not time-locked to the stimulus, which for purposes of such analyses can be considered "noise". Gaussian Process factor models provide a powerful tool for identifying shared structure in high-dimensional neural data.