Abstract
Introduction Classical studies of biological sensory systems use the following main technique: sensory stimuli are drawn from a pre-determined distribution P(stim) and presented to the animal; the ensemble associated with sensory response is collected and used to characterize the conditional distribution P(stim|resp) (or parameters thereof) as a model of sensory system function. However, most of the standard statistical tool used in neuroscience to estimate P(stim|resp) are valid under a very fundamental condition – that the samples used to estimate P(stim|resp) are drawn from the same distribution. This is obviously not the case in most studies of sensory system, where the samples are drawn explicitly from a different distribution, P(stim) (the sampling distribution), selected by the scientist. We demonstrate here that in this case the observed conditional distribution is P*(stim|resp) = P(stim|resp) *P(stim) and expectations estimated with this dataset are parameters of P*, not P. To characterize the actual functional properties of the system, one needs to use estimators developed within unequal probability sampling theory [1]. We apply one of these estimators, the HorvitzThompson estimator of the mean mHT = Σi xi/P(xi), to observations {xi} from the cricket cercal sensory system and illustrate the ensuing changes in apparent functionality (Figure 1).
Highlights
Classical studies of biological sensory systems use the following main technique: sensory stimuli are drawn from a pre-determined distribution P(stim) and presented to the animal; the ensemble associated with sensory response is collected and used to characterize the conditional distribution P(stim|resp) as a model of sensory system function
We demonstrate here that in this case the observed conditional distribution is P*(stim|resp) = P(stim|resp) *P(stim) and expectations estimated with this dataset are parameters of P*, not P
We apply one of these estimators, the HorvitzThompson estimator of the mean mHT = Σi xi/P(xi), to observations {xi} from the cricket cercal sensory system and illustrate the ensuing changes in apparent functionality (Figure 1)
Summary
Classical studies of biological sensory systems use the following main technique: sensory stimuli are drawn from a pre-determined distribution P(stim) and presented to the animal; the ensemble associated with sensory response is collected and used to characterize the conditional distribution P(stim|resp) (or parameters thereof) as a model of sensory system function. Address: Center for Computational Biology, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59715, USA Email: Alexander G Dimitrov - alex@cns.montana.edu from Seventeenth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS*2008 Portland, OR, USA.
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