Measuring spike train reliability

Measuring the degree of synchrony between two or more neuronal spike trains is an important tool in order to address issues such as neuronal coding, information transmission and model validation. Another prominent application is to measure the reliability of the response of individual neurons upon repeated presentations of the same stimulus. A number of both multivariate and bivariate measures have been proposed to address this issue. Multivariate approaches include the reliability measures by Hunter and Milton [1] and by Tiesinga [2], while bivariate approaches comprise the Victor-Purpura [3] and the van Rossum [4] distance, as well as the similarity measure proposed by Schreiber et al. [5], and, the most recent proposal, the ISI-distance [6], a method based on relative instantaneous firing rates. These approaches can be applied to multivariate data in a pairwise fashion, e.g., reliability can be defined as the average over all pairwise similarities. ... ...