# Predicting synchronous firing of large neural populations from sequential recordings

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method combining copula distributions and maximum entropy modeling to predict the collective activity of large neural populations from sequential recordings, overcoming limitations of simultaneous recordings.

## Contribution

The authors develop a new approach to infer full neural population activity from sequential recordings, capturing collective behaviors like noise correlations and synchrony.

## Key findings

- Accurately predicted noise correlations among neurons.
- Generalized predictions to different stimuli and experiments.
- Predicted synchronous activity growth with population size.

## Abstract

A major goal in neuroscience is to understand how populations of neurons code for stimuli or actions. While the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously is increasing at a fast pace, in most cases these recordings cannot access a complete population. In particular, it is hard to simultaneously record all the neurons of the same type in a given area. Recent progress have made possible to profile each recorded neuron in a given area thanks to genetic and physiological tools, and to pool together recordings from neurons of the same type across different experimental sessions. However, it is unclear how to infer the activity of a full population of neurons of the same type from these sequential recordings. Neural networks exhibit collective behaviour, e.g. noise correlations and synchronous activity, that are not directly captured by a conditionally-independent model that would just put together the spike trains from sequential recordings. Here we show that we can infer the activity of a full population of retina ganglion cells from sequential recordings, using a novel method based on copula distributions and maximum entropy modeling. From just the spiking response of each ganglion cell to a repeated stimulus, and a few pairwise recordings, we could predict the noise correlations using copulas, and then the full activity of a large population of ganglion cells of the same type using maximum entropy modeling. Remarkably, we could generalize to predict the population responses to different stimuli and even to different experiments. We could therefore use our method to construct a very large population merging cells' responses from different experiments. We predicted synchronous activity accurately and showed it grew substantially with the number of neurons. This approach is a promising way to infer population activity from sequential recordings in sensory areas.