Cepstrum Based Unsupervised Spike Classification

Abstract

In this research, we study the effect of feature selection in the spike detection and sorting accuracy. We introduce a new feature representation for neural spikes from multichannel recordings. The features selection plays a significant role in analyzing the response of brain neurons. The more precise selection of features leads to a more accurate spike sorting, which can group spikes more precisely into clusters based on the similarity of spikes. Proper spike sorting will enable the association between spikes and neurons. Different with other threshold-based methods, the cepstrum of spike signals is employed in our method to select the candidates of spike features. To choose the best features among different candidates, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is utilized. Then, we rely on the super paramagnetic method to cluster the neural spikes based on KS features. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieve more accurate clustering results but also reduce computational burden, which implies that it can be applied into real-time spike analysis.