17c276c8e723eb46aef576537e9d56d0-Reviews.html

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper addresses the challenge of inferring synaptic connectivity in settings where one or more putative presynaptic neurons are stimulated while the membrane potential of a single postsynaptic neuron is recorded, as in modern two-photon microscopy experiments. The authors present a new probabilistic model for this experimental setup, along with a variational inference algorithm. They then develop an online, active learning algorithm to select the most informative stimuli. The efficacy of their algorithm is demonstrated using synthetic data generated from the model.