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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_4
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors present a method for reducing the
dimensionality of neural activity data. They take advantage of recent
advances in applied mathematics to solve sparse and low-rank matrix
approximation problems using convex relaxation, as well as of Bregman
divergences for exponential families. They apply the method to synthetic
data.
I find the work mathematically sound and the presentation
generally clear. However, the authors may want to devote more attention to
introducing the problem. Indeed, in the beginning of Section 2, they
postulate the existence of a low-dimensional subspace of neuronal
activity. It would seem to me that the dynamics in this low-dimensional
subspace, Eq.(1), should be mediated by neurons and their synaptic
connections. However, Eq.(1) does not include the synaptic connectivity
matrix D, which instead appears in Eq.2. Because the authors point out
that the low-dimensional dynamics would be present even in the absence of
inputs (u_t = 0) I don’t understand what physical substrate underlies the
dynamics of low-dimensional activity.
Additionally, while I admire
the authors for their effort to introduce fashionable applied mathematics
techniques into neuroscience, it is difficult to evaluate the value of
their method until it is applied to actual data and generates insight into
the function of a biological system.
Minor on line 291:
minimizing D -> minimizing over D
Q2: Please
summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
Dimensionality reduction method using convex
relaxation of rank minimization Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper combines a variety of standard techniques
to describe and learn a generative model for multiple spike trains. They
posit that neural activity can be generated via a combination of low
dimensional latent variables and direct interactions. They learn the
mapping from the low dimensional latent space to the high dimensional
firing rate space by imposing a nuclear norm penalty, and they learn the
sparse interactions by imposing an L1 penalty, similar to stable principal
component pursuit. To minimize the nuclear norm, they use ADMM and to
learn the various parameters they do coordinate descent. They show that
they can recover the parameters from data sampled from their own model.
Overall, while the combination of techniques is interesting, this
paper feels like that is all there is - just a combination of existing
techniques. They do not apply their algorithm to real data (a strong
requirement in my opinion) and show that it yields scientific insight,
above and beyond previous models. Overall, I do not believe this paper is
a sufficient conceptual advance over previous work.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
An interesting combination of existing generative
models and fitting techniques, but not a sufficient conceptual advance,
and no application to real data. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Summary: The author(s) proposed a method for
dimensionarity reduction method that allows multiple dynamical systems
therein. The method is a natural extension of PCA and uses the alternating
direction method to solve a convex but non-smooth problem. The experiments
show the superiority of the method.
Quality: The generative
model is appropriate for modeling neural activities and the proposed
method for estimating the parameters in the model is reasonable and novel.
Clarity: The manuscript is well written and easy to
understand.
Originality: The work is original enough although
it uses several existing methods.
Significance: The proposed
method has extensions and can be used in a wide range of applications.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This work is based on a good model and an appropriate
estimation method. The proposed method worked well in the
experiments.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
Reviewer 4:
>The authors may want to devote
more attention to introducing the problem. Indeed, in the beginning of
Section 2, they postulate the existence of a low-dimensional subspace of
neuronal activity. It would seem to me that the dynamics in this
low-dimensional subspace, Eq.(1), should be mediated by neurons and their
synaptic connections. However, Eq.(1) does not include the synaptic
connectivity matrix D, which instead appears in Eq.2. Because the authors
point out that the low-dimensional dynamics would be present even in the
absence of inputs (u_t = 0) I don’t understand what physical substrate
underlies the dynamics of low-dimensional activity.
There are many
theoretical and experimental results supporting the existence of
low-dimensional dynamics in some neural systems. The citations provided in
the introduction all use dimensionality reduction techniques to find
low-dimensional network states. Some of these network states are
correlated with behavioral or perceptual activity, others seem to reflect
intrinsic dynamics, but in all cases they demonstrate the presence of
interesting low-dimensional structure. There are also results from
physiology showing highly correlated activity in large networks [e.g.
Schneidman et al, Nature (2006)] suggesting low-dimensional models can
account for most of the variability in these networks. On the theoretical
side, there is a rich literature showing how low-dimensional attractors
can emerge from the activity of large networks. We apologize if this was
not explained clearly enough in the introductory section, and we can
improve that in the final manuscript.
>Additionally, while I
admire the authors for their effort to introduce fashionable applied
mathematics techniques into neuroscience, it is difficult to evaluate the
value of their method until it is applied to actual data and generates
insight into the function of a biological system.
We agree that a
demonstration on real neural data would significantly strengthen the case
made in our paper. Since submission, we have tried our approach on several
real neural datasets with promising results. We are most excited about
results on data from the group of Nicho Hatsopoulos. The data consists of
spike times from 125 neurons in macaque motor cortex during a two
dimensional reaching task. We binned spikes every 100 ms and estimated
linear dynamical systems by the same procedure used to generate the
results in Fig. 2., using 8000 time bins of training data. We evaluated
the approximate log likelihood on 2000 time bins of held out data using
Laplace filtering. Nuclear norm smoothing significantly improved the held
out log likelihood of the best linear model (~750 bits/s) over fitting
without strong nuclear norm penalty (~1200 bits/s), and the best linear
model required fewer dimensions (~15) than the best linear model without
strong nuclear norm penalty (~35). We plan to include these results in the
revised paper.
>Minor on line 291: minimizing D ->
minimizing over D
We thank the reviewer and will correct that in
the final manuscript.
Reviewer 5:
>To learn the various
parameters they do coordinate descent.
The parameters of the
dynamical system were actually learned using spectral methods applied to
the estimate of low-dimensional latent activity. We can rewrite this part
of the paper to make that more clear if necessary.
>They do not
apply their algorithm to real data (a strong requirement in my opinion)
and show that it yields scientific insight, above and beyond previous
models.
Please see our response to reviewer 4 on the same point.
We'd also like to bring attention to two sections of the paper
that the reviewers declined to comment on, and therefore we believe were
not highlighted enough in the original manuscript. First, evaluating the
performance of exponential family PCA by use of Bregman divergence
explained, analogous to variance explained in regular PCA, is not
something that we have seen elsewhere in the dimensionality reduction
literature. While the mathematics behind it is not new, we believe that it
is a simple and useful method for evaluating low-dimensional exponential
family models that deserves wider attention.
Second, we believe
our sparse+low rank approach is the first convex method to address the
common input problem in connectivity inference. Numerous studies have used
sparse or group-sparse penalties to smooth networks fit to spiking
activity, both on real data [Pillow et al, Nature (2008)], and model data
[Stevenson et al, IEEE Trans. Neural Systems and Rehabilitation (2009)],
[Hertz, Roudi and Tyrcha, arXiv (2011)]. Recent work [Gerhard et al, PLoS
Comp Bio (2013)] has validated these methods on real biological neural
networks with known connectivity. These networks are small and
fully-observed, so no regularization is needed. We show that in some cases
a sparsity penalty alone gives no benefit in the presence of common
inputs, while a combination of low rank and sparsity penalty does, so long
as the common inputs are relatively low dimensional. This is a novel
result in the modeling literature and one that is likely to have important
practical benefit as connectivity inference methods are scaled to more
complex neural systems. While we would love to validate our approach to
connectivity inference on real data, there are not yet data at the
relevant scale where ground truth connectivity is known.
We
appreciate that this point may not have come across clearly enough in the
manuscript as it's now organized. While the first section of the paper
focused on learning models of the dynamics of common inputs, the focus of
the experimental section on sparse+low rank penalties was on removing the
confounding effect of common inputs, and some context may have been lost
in the transition. We will rewrite the paper to better contextualize and
highlight the importance of these results.
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