Neural spiking for causal inference and learning.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lansdell BJ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC10104331 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Neural spiking for causal inference and learning.
Lansdell Benjamin James BJ Kording Konrad Paul KP
PLoS computational biology 20230404 4
When a neuron is driven beyond its threshold, it spikes. The fact that it does not communicate its continuous membrane potential is usually seen as a computational liability. Here we show that this spiking mechanism allows neurons to produce an unbiased estimate of their causal influence, and a way of approximating gradient descent-based learning. Importantly, neither activity of upstream neurons, which act as confounders, nor downstream non-linearities bias the results. We show how spiking enab ...[more]
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