Latency correction in sparse neuronal spike trains with overlapping global events

Background: In Kreuz et al., J Neurosci Methods 381, 109703 (2022) two methods were proposed that perform latency correction, i.e., optimize the spike time alignment of sparse neuronal spike trains with well-defined global spiking events. The first one based on direct shifts is fast but uses only partial latency information, while the other one makes use of the full information but relies on the computationally costly simulated annealing. Both methods reach their limits and can become unreliable when successive global events are not sufficiently separated or even overlap. New Method: Here we propose an iterative scheme that combines the advantages of the two original methods by using in each step as much of the latency information as possible and by employing a very fast extrapolation direct shift method instead of the much slower simulated annealing. Results: We illustrate the effectiveness and the improved performance, measured in terms of the relative shift error, of the new iterative scheme not only on si