Recent studies have applied dimensionality reduction methods to understand how the multi-dimensional structure of neural population activity gives rise to brain function. It is unclear, however, how the results obtained from dimensionality reduction generalize to recordings with larger numbers of neurons and trials or how these results relate to the underlying network structure. We address these questions by applying factor analysis to recordings in the visual cortex of non-human primates and to spiking network models that self-generate irregular activity through a balance of excitation and inhibition. We compared the scaling trends of two key outputs of dimensionality reduction—shared dimensionality and percent shared variance—with neuron and trial count. We found that the scaling properties of networks with non-clustered and clustered connectivity differed, and that the in vivo recordings were more consistent with the clustered network. Furthermore, recordings from tens of neurons were sufficient to identify the dominant modes of shared variability that generalize to larger portions of the network. These findings can help guide the interpretation of dimensionality reduction outputs in regimes of limited neuron and trial sampling and help relate these outputs to the underlying network structure.
Dimensionality reduction methods (for review, see [1]) have revealed compelling descriptions of neural mechanisms underlying decision-making [2,3], motor control [4,5], olfaction [6], working memory [7], visual attention [8], audition [9], rule learning [10], and speech [11]. These methods characterize the multi-dimensional structure of neural population activity based on how the activity of different neurons co-varies. Despite the growing use of dimensionality reduction in systems neuroscience, it is unclear whether results obtained using a limited number of neurons and trials are informative of the larger circuit from which the neurons are sampled [12]. Furthermore, since the connectivity structure of the neural population is typically unknown during in vivo recordings, it is unclear how these results relate to the underlying network structure. This paper addresses these gaps by applying dimensionality reduction to population activity from in vivo recordings and spiking network models. While our ultimate goal is to understand the population activity structure of in vivo recordings, there are several important benefits of analyzing population activity generated by spiking network models. First, because we can sample as many neurons and trials as desired from a spiking network model, we can measure how the outputs of dimensionality reduction vary over a wide range of neuron and trial counts. This allows us to assess whether the results obtained using a limited number of neurons and trials are representative of the larger network. Second, we can assess how these scaling trends are influenced by the known underlying network structure. Third, we can study how the results are influenced by which neurons are sampled in the network. This paper utilizes these three benefits of spiking network models to develop a deeper intuition for the relationship between the outputs of dimensionality reduction and the underlying neural circuit. Spiking network models that balance excitation and inhibition have been widely studied to understand the mechanisms underlying spike timing variability and correlated variability across neurons (e. g. , [13–17]). Recent studies have introduced clustering structure and found that the single-neuron and pairwise statistics of these networks better capture the slow fluctuations in firing rate observed during in vivo recordings [17–19]. In this work, we focus on two types of spiking network models: clustered networks and classic balanced (non-clustered) networks. To study single-trial population activity, we used factor analysis (FA), a linear dimensionality reduction method [2,4, 20–22]. A key feature of FA is that it partitions spike count variability into a component that is shared among the recorded neurons and a component that is independent across neurons. From a statistical perspective, the shared component can be thought of as the co-fluctuations of the underlying firing rates of the recorded neurons, and the independent component can be thought of as the Poisson-like spiking variability of neurons [5,23]. Whereas the independent component could be averaged away during downstream processing by pooling across neurons, the shared component can be particularly consequential for behavior [24,25]. The partition between the shared and independent components can depend on which neurons are recorded. For example, a neuron might not co-vary with any of the recorded neurons, and instead co-vary with unrecorded neurons. By recording from more neurons, a larger proportion of a neuron’s spike count variability may be assigned to the shared component, and correspondingly less to the independent component. In this work, we leveraged this separation of variability into shared and independent components to quantify two aspects of the population activity structure: (1) shared dimensionality, which is a measure of the complexity of the shared activity co-fluctuations, and (2) percent shared variance, which measures the prominence of the shared component in the spiking activity. These measures generalize the ideas behind spike count correlation [26], measured between pairs of neurons, to an entire population of neurons. In addition, we used FA to identify the characteristic ways in which the neurons co-fluctuate, known as the modes of population activity. The modes of population activity have provided insight about the neural basis of working memory [27], decision making [3,28], motor preparation [29,30], and learning [4]. We studied the scaling trends of shared dimensionality and percent shared variance with increasing numbers of neurons and trials. To perform this analysis we used spontaneous activity recorded in the primary visual cortex (V1) of anesthetized macaque monkeys and activity generated from non-clustered and clustered spiking network models. In addition, we assessed the effects of network structure on these metrics and found substantial differences in the scaling properties of the clustered and non-clustered networks, with the clustered network showing many similarities to the in vivo recordings. Furthermore, in vivo recordings from tens of neurons were sufficient to identify dominant modes of shared variability that generalized to recordings of larger numbers of neurons. Our results demonstrate how the outputs of dimensionality reduction depend on the amount of data and the underlying network structure, and provide support for the use of dimensionality reduction with current recording technologies (i. e. , tens of neurons and hundreds of trials).
We first studied how dshared and percent shared variance scale with neuron count for in vivo recordings. To do this, we applied FA to spontaneous activity recorded in primary visual cortex (V1) of anesthetized macaques. We binned neural activity into 1-second epochs, where each bin is referred to as a ‘trial’. Thus, the number of trials is equivalent to the recording time (in seconds). We sampled increasing numbers of neurons or trials from the recorded population activity, and measured dshared and percent shared variance for each neuron or trial count. We expected dshared and percent shared variance to either saturate or to increase with increasing neuron or trial count. Saturating dshared would suggest that we have identified all of the modes for the network (or networks) sampled by the recording electrodes and increasing dshared would suggest that additional modes are being revealed by monitoring additional neurons or trials. We found that dshared increased with neuron count (Fig 3A, Top), while percent shared variance remained stable with increasing neuron count (Fig 3A, Bottom). Similarly, additional trials resulted in increasing dshared and stable percent shared variance (Fig 3B). These scaling trends in dshared and percent shared variance remained the same for spike count bins ranging from 200 ms to 1 second (S1 Fig). We also found that not taking into account the sequential nature of the time bins when using factor analysis was reasonable for 1-second bins (S2 Fig). Together these results demonstrate that, within the range of neurons and trials available from our recordings, additional neurons and trials allow us to identify additional shared dimensions. This implies that we have not sampled enough neurons or trials to identify all of the modes of shared variability. However, given the stable percent shared variance observed in Fig 3A and 3B (bottom panels), the results suggest that the shared component is dominated by the first few modes and that additional modes do not explain substantial shared variance. This is supported by analyses in the next section. Recent studies have explored how different modes of population activity are used during different task epochs [28,29], during learning [4], and after perturbations [30], as well as to encode different types of information [3,27]. It is currently unclear how the modes identified with a limited sampling of neurons relate to those identified from increasingly larger samplings. We studied this question by measuring (1) shifts in the subspaces spanned by the dominant modes and (2) changes in percent shared variance along each mode as neurons are added to the analysis. We first examined the modes for the in vivo recordings (Fig 4A left panel), ordered from most dominant (i. e. , explaining the largest amount of shared variance) to least dominant. Consistent with previous work [31–34], the most dominant mode (left-most column in Fig 4A) comprised many entries of the same sign, implying that a large portion of shared activity resulted from many neurons increasing and decreasing their activity together. This mode accounted for over 60% of the shared variability (Fig 4A right panel), and there were other modes representing more complex interactions that also accounted for a substantial proportion of shared variability. To measure how modes of shared variability from in vivo recordings changed direction in the population activity space with increasing neuron count, we performed the following procedure. We first sampled sets of 80 excitatory neurons from each array and then subsampled 20,40, or 60 neurons from each 80-neuron set. We sampled such that the 40-neuron sample was a subset of the 60-neuron sample and that the 20-neuron sample was a subset of the 40-neuron sample, ensuring that all sets contained the 20-neuron sample. We then identified the five most dominant modes in each of the 20-, 40-, 60-, or 80-neuron sets. We measured the principal angles between modes from the subsampled sets and modes from the 80-neuron set based on the entries in each mode corresponding to the neurons in the 20-neuron set. Smaller principal angles indicated greater similarity between modes. Fig 4B shows that the most dominant modes remained largely unchanged as neuron count increased. By definition, the angles increased with principal angle index because angles were computed beginning with the smallest possible angle between sets of modes. Percent shared variance along each mode also remained stable with increasing neuron count (Fig 4C). Note that the quantity plotted in Fig 4A (right panel) is related to, but different from, the quantity plotted in Fig 4C. Whereas Fig 4A (right panel) considers only the shared variability, Fig 4C assesses how much of the overall spike count variability is assigned to the shared component (as in Fig 3, see Methods for details). Overall, our study of the modes from in vivo recordings revealed that a few dominant modes explained most of the shared variance and that these dominant modes remained stable as we added neurons to the analysis. In the previous sections, we identified trends in dshared and percent shared variance using in vivo recordings. Several experimental constraints limit the types of questions we can ask using in vivo recordings. First, we are limited in the number of neurons and the number of trials that are recorded. Second, in most experiments, we have no knowledge of the connectivity structure of the underlying network and cannot relate properties of the population activity to network structure. In this section we overcome these constraints by analyzing activity obtained from network models. We consider recurrent spiking network models with distinct excitatory and inhibitory populations whose synaptic interactions are dynamically balanced [13,14]. In particular, we focus on two subclasses of this model: one where excitatory neurons are grouped into clusters that have a high connection probability (clustered network) and one where the excitatory population has homogeneous connectivity (non-clustered network). Both the clustered and non-clustered networks have been shown to capture variability in spike timing [14,17]. Clustered networks have also been shown to demonstrate slow fluctuations in firing rate [17] consistent with in vivo recordings [20,35,36]. In the particular clustered network studied here, each cluster resembles a bistable unit with low and high activity states that lead neurons in the same cluster to change their activity together. We expected to identify dimensions that reflected these co-fluctuations within clusters, resulting in dshared bounded by the number of clusters (i. e. , 50 dimensions) and high percent shared variance. In contrast, the non-clustered network lacks the highly correlated activity seen in the clustered network [13,14,17], and so we expected to see little or no shared variance. Note that no shared variance would result in both percent shared variance and dshared being zero. Small amounts of shared variance relative to total variance would result in low percent shared variance and either low or high dshared depending on the multi-dimensional structure of the shared variance. To test how clustered connectivity affects the population activity structure and to understand how the population-level metrics scale with the number of neurons and trials, we performed the following analysis. We applied FA to spike counts, from non-clustered and clustered network simulations. Each spike count was taken in a 1-second bin of simulation time, which we refer to as a ‘trial’ in analogy to physiological recordings. We then increased the neuron count, as we did in Fig 3 for the in vivo recordings, with the number of trials fixed at 1200 to match the analyses shown in Fig 3A. We observed increasing dshared with neuron count in the clustered network and a dshared of zero for all neuron counts in the non-clustered network (Fig 5A, Top). The percent shared variance for the clustered network increased with neuron count and saturated at approximately 90% (Fig 5A, Bottom). In contrast, the non-clustered network showed zero percent shared variance at all neuron counts. In other words, in the range of trials and neurons studied, FA could not identify any shared population-level structure in the non-clustered network. These results agree with our predictions, namely non-zero dshared and high percent shared variance in the clustered network and zero dshared and percent shared variance in the non-clustered network. We next investigated how dshared and percent shared variance change for an increasing number of trials, with the number of model neurons fixed at 80 to match the analyses shown in Fig 3B. We anticipated that dshared and percent shared variance would increase to a saturation point after which enough trials would be available to reliably identify all of the modes of shared variability. In the clustered network, we observed that dshared (Fig 5B, Top) and percent shared variance (Fig 5B, Bottom) initially increased and then saturated, indicating that fewer than 1200 trials were needed to characterize dshared and percent shared variance for 80 neurons sampled from the clustered network. In the non-clustered network, we observed zero dshared and percent shared variance for all trial counts. Therefore, of the two networks studied, only the clustered network demonstrated population-level shared structure within the range of trials obtained in the in vivo recording. Comparing the model network results (Fig 5) with the experimental results (Fig 3) obtained from equal numbers of neuron and trials, we observed similar trends in the clustered network and in vivo recordings. In both cases we observed increasing dshared and saturating percent shared variance with neuron and trial count. Note that we did not tune network parameters (e. g. , firing rates, number of clusters, etc.) in the clustered network to match the in vivo recordings and, therefore, we did not expect the magnitudes of dshared or percent shared variance to match in the two cases. However, the trends of increasing dshared with neuron and trial count accompanied by stable percent shared variance suggest that, in both cases, the population activity is largely governed by a few dominant modes that are well characterized within the range of neurons and trials obtainable with current recording technology. To better understand how the outputs of dimensionality reduction for limited sampling reflect larger portions of the network, we investigated how the trends from Fig 5 continued for larger numbers of neurons and trials. We first varied the number of neurons in the analysis up to 500 neurons. This required us to increase the number of trials from 1200 to 10,000 trials in order to fit the larger number of parameters in the FA model. We found that dshared in the clustered network saturated with roughly 100 neurons, whereas dshared in the non-clustered network continued to increase with neuron count (Fig 6A, Top). In both networks, the percent shared variance remained stable with additional neurons, but the clustered network had higher shared variance than the non-clustered network (Fig 6A, Bottom). Within the experiment regime of neuron counts (10 to 80 neurons) we found non-zero dshared and percent shared variance for both networks (Fig 6A, Inset). Overall, in the clustered network, we observed saturation in dshared and percent shared variance with few neurons relative to the network size. This likely stemmed from the fact that neurons from the same cluster varied together. Therefore, we were able to identify the majority of shared variance once multiple neurons were sampled from most clusters. That result contrasts with our observation of increasing dimensionality and low shared variance in the non-clustered network, which lacks modes describing activity from groups of co-varying neurons. It is therefore likely that we identified many modes that each explain small amounts of variability. We investigate this in greater detail below. To study the effects of large trial count on population-level metrics, we computed dshared and percent shared variance for 80 neurons while varying the trial count up to 20,000 (Fig 6B). The non-clustered network had no identifiable shared population activity structure when the trial count was less than 5,000, consistent with Fig 3; however, with 5,000 or more trials, we identified non-zero dshared. It is clear from this result that trial counts within the experimental regime were insufficient to identify shared dimensions, but that additional trials revealed shared dimensions. Percent shared variance followed a similar trend, with zero percent shared variance below 5,000 trials, as expected given zero dshared. These results show that many more trials were required to identify the small amounts of shared variability in the non-clustered network compared to the clustered network. The above analyses showed substantial differences between the two model networks. In the clustered network, the shared population activity structure was salient (approximately 90% of the raw spike count variability was shared among neurons) and defined by a small number of modes (approximately 20 modes), all of which could be identified using a modest number of neurons and trials. In contrast, for the non-clustered network, the shared population activity was more subtle (approximately 20% of the raw spike count variability was shared among neurons), distributed across many modes, and required large numbers of trials to identify. So far we have sampled neurons at random from the model networks. However, in our in vivo recordings, we sampled from a spatially restricted population of neurons. When analyzing a sampling of neurons from a network, it is unclear how the particular neurons that are sampled influence dshared and percent shared variance. To investigate the effects of non-random sampling procedures, we varied the number of clusters represented in a 50-neuron set. We found that dshared generally increased with cluster representation (Fig 7A). Interestingly, dshared exceeded cluster representation for low cluster counts, likely representing less dominant modes that are washed out when more clusters are represented. For the 50-cluster case, dshared was 22. 5 ± 0. 17 (mean ± standard error), roughly equal to the saturation value for the clustered network of 21. 8 ± 0. 25 (mean ± standard error, 500-neuron, filled data point in Fig 6A). Unlike dshared, percent shared variance remained stable across a wide range of cluster representation (Fig 7B), even in the most extreme cases of sampling all neurons from a single cluster (one cluster represented) and sampling one neuron from each cluster (50 clusters represented). In our analyses, the distribution of samples across the network influenced the observed dshared, with broader distributions (i. e. , with more clusters being represented in the sample) better characterizing the overall network. With only 50 carefully chosen neurons, we obtained the saturation dshared and percent shared variance shown in Fig 6. For in vivo networks, our lack of information about the underlying connectivity of the network prevents us from knowing exactly how we should sample to minimize the number of neurons required to fully characterize the population activity structure of the network. However, our results suggest that tailored sampling procedures may allow characterization of shared variability with fewer neurons than random sampling. As we did with the in vivo recordings (Fig 4), we also examined the modes of shared variability for the model networks. In the top 50 modes of the clustered network (Fig 8A, rows sorted by cluster identity and mean cluster firing rate), the entries corresponding to same-cluster neurons tended to have similar values. Thus these modes described same-cluster neurons increasing or decreasing their activity together. Since the modes were ordered by dominance (i. e. , columns ordered by amount of shared variance explained), this indicates that the dominant interactions in the clustered network are those between clusters. The modes beyond the 50th mode did not reflect the cluster identities of the neurons, but instead described more subtle interactions between neurons both within and across clusters. Additionally, neurons or clusters of neurons with higher mean firing rates tended to be involved in more dominant modes in both model networks (Fig 8A and 8B). This is reasonable because neurons with higher firing rates tend to have higher variance [37], and are therefore capable of covarying more strongly with other neurons (i. e. , show higher activity covariance) than neurons with lower firing rates. In contrast to the clustered network, there was no apparent clustering in the mode entries for the non-clustered network (Fig 8B), as one would expect from the random uniform connectivity of the network. Comparing the modes for the model networks (Fig 8A and 8B) to those for the in vivo recordings (Fig 4A), neither model network reproduced the first dominant mode of the in vivo recordings, which described all neurons increasing and decreasing their activity together. We further asked whether it would be possible to reorder the neurons from the in vivo recordings (Fig 4A) to obtain clustering structure as shown in Fig 8A for the clustered network. Using the k-means algorithm to try to identify similar rows of the modes matrix, we did not find clear clustering structure in the in vivo recordings (S3 Fig, also see Discussion). Each of the modes in Fig 8A and 8B describe some percentage of the overall shared variance. A small number of dominant modes explained a large proportion of the shared variance in the clustered network (Fig 8C), whereas most of the modes in the non-clustered network explained similar amounts of shared variance (Fig 8D). We summarized these curves (Fig 8C and 8D) using dshared, defined as the number of modes needed to explain 95% of the shared variance (see Methods). For a representative sample of neurons and trials from the clustered network, only 20 modes were needed to describe 95% of the shared variance (Fig 8C, consistent with Fig 6A for 500 neurons), whereas 99 modes were needed in the non-clustered network (Fig 8D, consistent with Fig 6A for 500 neurons). Although one might initially expect dshared to equal the number of clusters (50) in the clustered network, we found that dshared was 20 because the top 20 modes were sufficient for explaining 95% of the shared variance. We then assessed how the modes of shared variability changed direction in the multi-dimensional population activity space with increasing neuron count, using the same procedure as with the in vivo recordings (Fig 4B). We found that, as neuron count increased, principal angles between the modes from the subsampled population and the modes from the 500-neuron population decreased in both networks (Fig 9A and 9B), indicating that the modes became more similar to those of the 500-neuron set as neuron count increased. This implies that sampling additional neurons provides a better characterization of the modes. In the clustered network, the principal angles decreased to near zero in the 80-neuron set (Fig 9A), demonstrating that the first five modes were nearly identical in the 80-neuron and 500-neuron sets. However, in the non-clustered network, principal angles remained relatively large for all sets (Fig 9B). These results show that, with as few as 80 neurons, we obtain an accurate estimate of the modes of shared variability in the wider network in the clustered case, but not the non-clustered case. Analyzing the modes of shared variability allows us to better understand trends observed in Fig 6A. Typically, one would expect percent shared variance to increase when dshared increases because each dimension explains some amount of (positive) shared variance. However, for the non-clustered network, we found that dshared increased without an associated increase in percent shared variance. This can be understood by the fact that the dominant modes changed as more neurons were added to the analysis (Fig 9B). As a result, the amount of shared variance explained by the leading modes could decrease as more modes are identified. We assessed this by partitioning the overall percent shared variance in Fig 6A into a percent shared variance along each mode and examining how the distribution of percent shared variance across the modes changed with additional neurons. In the clustered network, we found that percent shared variance was very similar between the 80- and 500-neuron sets (Fig 9C), with percent shared variance in the top five modes (the same modes used in Fig 9A) dropping only 9. 22 ± 1. 70% (mean ± standard error). In contrast, for the non-clustered network, percent shared variance dropped 60. 7 ± 2. 07% (mean ± standard error) (Fig 9D) in the top five modes (the same modes used in Fig 9B). Thus, there is a shift in percent shared variance from dominant to less dominant modes in the non-clustered network as neurons are added, which explains how it is possible for dshared to increase without an associated increase in percent shared variance. For the in vivo recordings, we also see that dshared increases without an associated increase in percent shared variance (Fig 3A). However, this occurs for a different reason than for the non-clustered network. As neurons are added to the in vivo analysis, the dominant modes tend to be stable (Fig 4B), so we do not see the same shift in percent shared variance from dominant to less dominant modes (Fig 4C, 17. 7% ± 2. 3 drop in percent variance in the top five modes) as in the non-clustered network. Furthermore, the additional modes identified with more neurons explain only small amounts of shared variance relative to the dominant modes (Fig 4C). Thus, the percent shared variance appears not to increase for the in vivo recordings because the additional shared variance contributed by newly identified dimensions is small. In summary, for the clustered network, the dominant modes of shared variability among the original neurons remained stable as neurons were added to the analysis. In contrast, the non-clustered network modes changed as neurons were added to the analysis and tended to become less dominant (i. e. , the percent shared variance along those modes decreased). The results shown here for the clustered network are largely consistent with the results for in vivo recordings (Fig 4B and 4C). The similarities between the clustered network and in vivo recordings remained true when we matched number of neurons and trials for the clustered network to in vivo recordings (S4 Fig).
In this study, we used V1 recordings and spiking network models to understand how the results obtained using dimensionality reduction methods generalize to recordings with larger numbers of neurons and trials, as well as how these results relate to the underlying network structure. We found that recordings of tens of neurons and hundreds of trials were sufficient to identify the dominant modes of shared variability in both in vivo recordings and a spiking network model with clustered connectivity. Comparing spiking network models, we found that scaling properties differed in non-clustered and clustered networks and that in vivo recordings were more consistent with the clustered network. These findings can help guide the interpretation of dimensionality reduction analyses in terms of limited neuron and trial sampling and underlying network structure. We focused on variability that is shared among simultaneously-recorded neurons. Shared variability has been widely studied due to its implications for the amount of information that is encoded by a population of neurons [25]. For the same population of neurons, the dimensionality computed using the raw (spike count) covariability can be substantially different from that computed using the shared covariability. To see this, consider a population of independent neurons. As the number of neurons in the analysis grows, the dimensionality based on the raw covariability would increase, whereas the dimensionality based on the shared covariability (i. e. , dshared) would remain at zero because independent neurons have no shared variance. We used FA to partition the raw covariance matrix into shared and independent components and measured the dimensionality of the shared component [5,23]. By contrast, principal components analysis (PCA), a standard dimensionality reduction method, applied to spike counts measures dimensionality of the raw covariability. Recently, Mazzucato et al. used PCA to examine the dimensionality of 3 to 9 neurons recorded simultaneously in rat gustatory cortex [19]. Despite the difference in methods used to compute dimensionality, they also found that dimensionality increases with neuron and trial count in in vivo recordings and spiking network models. Our use of FA to isolate the shared and independent components provides two important insights. First, we are able to assess the scaling trends of the dimensionality of the shared component in isolation. Relative to independent variability, shared variability is more difficult to average away within the network and is therefore more likely to influence downstream processing. Our dimensionality measurement indicates the richness of this shared aspect of the population activity. Second, we can measure the percent of the overall variance that is shared across neurons, which provides context to the dimensionality metric. For example, in the non-clustered network (Fig 6A, Top), given many trials and neurons, we identified many shared dimensions. However, these dimensions represented only a small fraction of the overall variance (Fig 6A, Bottom). By contrast, the clustered network exhibited fewer dimensions, but those dimensions represented a large fraction of the overall variance (Fig 6A). These results suggest that FA provides a more nuanced characterization of single-trial population activity than PCA. In this work, we studied spontaneous activity during in vivo recordings and in spiking network models. Our study could be extended to scaling trends in evoked activity, in which visual stimuli are presented during the V1 recordings and non-zero inputs are used in the spiking network models. Previous studies have found that shared variance tends to decrease after stimulus presentation [20,35,38–40] and that the scaling properties of PCA dimensionality change after stimulus presentation [19]. However, under certain conditions, the population activity patterns expressed in spontaneous activity can resemble those expressed in evoked activity [9,41]. Studying the scaling properties of shared dimensionality and percent shared variance using evoked activity would allow us to better interpret such results in the context of limited neuron and trial sampling. We focused on trends in shared dimensionality and percent shared variance. Specific shared dimensionality and percent shared variance values obtained for the model networks likely depend on model parameters, including the number of clusters, the synaptic weights, and the probability of synaptic connection. We used the parameters described in [16], and we did not attempt to adjust parameters to make results match those found in experimental data. An interesting avenue for future work would be to understand the trade-offs among the different model parameters necessary to reproduce the absolute levels of shared dimensionality and percent shared variance measured for the in vivo recordings. While many existing models reflect various aspects of neural activity, we studied two balanced spiking network models, which can be viewed as representing the two ends of a connectivity spectrum. At one end is the classic balanced network with homogeneous connectivity which has been studied for decades (i. e. , the non-clustered network) [14,15]. At the other end is a balanced network in which each excitatory neuron belongs to a particular cluster and there is high within-cluster connectivity (i. e. , the clustered network) [17–19]. Although neither of these model networks is a perfect match with cortical networks, both model networks have been shown to mimic some single-neuron and pairwise spiking statistics measured in cortical neurons [14,15,17,19]. Model networks which bridge these two ends of the spectrum are currently under development. Examples include networks with spatially dependent connectivity [42] and explicit stimulus tuning structure [43]. Analysis methods similar to those used here can be applied to study the population activity structure in those networks. Comparisons between network models and in vivo recordings are usually made using aggregate single-neuron and pairwise statistics, such as mean firing rate, Fano factor, or Pearson correlation [13,14,17]. To move beyond single-neuron and pairwise statistics, the present work illustrates how multi-dimensional population statistics can be used to compare model networks and in vivo recordings. This approach has been adopted by several recent studies [3,18,19,44] and can reveal discrepancies in the multi-dimensional activity patterns produced by model networks compared to biological networks of neurons. For example, the dominant mode of the in vivo recordings represented many neurons increasing and decreasing their activity together (Fig 4B, most elements in left-most column of the mode matrix are of the same sign). However, neither the clustered nor the non-clustered model reproduced this activity pattern in their dominant mode (Fig 8A and 8B). Such observations can guide the development of future network models. Recent developments in neural recording technology are making it feasible to record from orders of magnitude more neurons simultaneously than what is currently possible (e. g. , [45]). Thus it may soon be possible to analyze population activity for larger neuron counts from in vivo recordings. Furthermore, recent work has demonstrated the ability to access underlying network connectivity during in vivo recordings, an advance that may make it possible to determine the effects of connectivity structure on population activity [46,47]. However, the number of trials available for studying population activity is still limited by various experimental constraints, such as an animal’s satiation or recording stability. To increase trial counts, it may be possible to combine data across multiple sessions by identifying the same neurons across multiple sessions [48–50] or by applying novel statistical methods [51–53].
All experimental procedures followed guidelines approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University and New York University, and were in full compliance with the guidelines set forth in the US Public Health Service Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Details of the neural recordings were reported previously [38,54]. Briefly, we recorded from primary visual cortex of anesthetized, paralyzed male macaque monkeys. We maintained anesthesia throughout the experiments, typically 5-7 days, with a continuous intravenous infusion of sufentanil citrate (6-18 μg/kg/hr). Eye movements were minimized with a continuous intravenous infusion of vecuronium bromide (100-150 μg/kg/hr). We implanted multi-electrode arrays in primary visual cortex (V1) in three hemispheres of two anesthetized macaque monkeys. We recorded spontaneous activity for 20–30 minutes while a uniform gray screen was displayed on a computer monitor in front of the animal. Recorded waveform segments were sorted off-line using a competitive mixture decomposition method [55], after which waveform sorting for each electrode was refined by hand with custom time-amplitude window discrimination software taking into account waveform shape and inter-spike interval distribution. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was then computed as the ratio of the average waveform amplitude to the standard deviation across waveforms [56]. Units with SNR below 1. 5 and average spike counts less than one spike per second were excluded from the analyses, yielding a mixture of single- and multi-units, with median SNR of 2. 74,2. 39, and 2. 30 in the three arrays. The total number of units for each array was 118,88, and 82 units. We randomly selected 80 units from each array to facilitate comparison between arrays. We then divided the neural activity into 1-second epochs. We refer to each of those 1-second epochs as a “trial” throughout this work. Network simulations were performed using the same parameters as described in [17]. Briefly, we constructed a network of simulated neurons consisting of 4000 excitatory and 1000 inhibitory neurons. The voltage, V, for each neuron was modeled with the differential equation V ˙ = 1 τ (μ - V) + I s y n (1) where V ˙ is the derivative of the membrane potential and Isyn is the total synaptic input to the neuron. The membrane time constant τ was set to 15 ms for excitatory neurons and 10 ms for inhibitory neurons. The bias μ was defined for each neuron by drawing from a uniform distribution with values between 1. 1 and 1. 2 for excitatory neurons and 1 and 1. 05 for inhibitory neurons. These values helped ensure low mean firing rates similar to those observed in cortex [57]. A spike occurred when neurons reached the threshold Vth = 1, after which the neuron was reset to Vre = 0 with an absolute refractory period of 5 ms. Here we have normalized the voltages to range between 0 and 1, with a value of 0 corresponding to roughly -65 mV and a value of 1 corresponding to roughly -50 mV, as in biological networks. For each neuron, total synaptic input current, I i, s y n x (t), to neuron i in population x at time t was defined as I i, s y n x (t) = ∑ j y J i j x y F y * s j y (t) (2) where x, y ∈ {E, I} indicate populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons and J i j x y describes the synaptic weight from neuron j in population y to neuron i in population x. The convolution of the spike train, s j y (t), with a filter, Fy, is denoted by *. The filter, Fy is described by the equation F y (t) = 1 τ 2 - τ 1 (e - t / τ 2 - e - t / τ 1) (3) where time constants τ2 = 3 ms for excitatory synapses and 2 ms for inhibitory synapses and τ1 = 1 ms for all synapses, consistent with fast glutamatergic and GABAergic synaptic transmission. These values were selected to reproduce the effects of fast-acting excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters. One trial was defined as one second of time according to the simulation. We simulated two network structures, one with homogeneous connection probability across excitatory neurons (non-clustered network) and one with clusters of high within-cluster connection probability (clustered network). In the non-clustered network, synaptic strengths were JEE = 0. 024, JEI = −0. 045, JIE = 0. 014, and JII = −0. 057. The probability of synaptic connection between excitatory neurons projecting onto other excitatory neurons occurred with probability pEE = 0. 2. All other types of synaptic connections occurred with probability pEI = pIE = pII = 0. 5. These connection probabilities are similar to the connection probabilities seen in cortex [58,59]. When no synaptic connection existed between neurons, J i j x y was set to zero. In the clustered network, the probability of connection between excitatory neurons depended on whether two neurons were in the same cluster or in different clusters, with p I N E E = 0. 4854 for pairs within the same cluster and p O U T E E = 0. 1942 for pairs in different clusters (mean connection probability was pEE = 0. 2). This ratio of p I N E E to p o u t E E has been shown to maximize spiking variability for this network size [17]. Synaptic strength between excitatory neurons was J I N E E = 0. 0456 for within-cluster synapses and J O U T E E = 0. 024 for between-cluster synapses. These parameters were used ensure that cluster transitions led to spike train autocorrelation functions with decay timescales consistent with in vivo recordings [35]. All other synapses were set as specified above for the non-clustered network. The clustered network contained 50 clusters of 80 neurons each. We used factor analysis (FA) to characterize the population activity structure [2,4, 20–22]. In contrast to principal component analysis (PCA), FA explicitly partitions the spike count covariance into a component that is shared across neurons in the recorded population and a component that is independent across neurons [20]. This allows us to characterize the shared population activity structure (i. e. , the shared component), which can be masked by Poisson-like spiking variability (i. e. , the independent component) during single-trial activity. As a result, FA is more appropriate than PCA for analyzing single-trial spike counts [23]. FA is defined by: x ∼ N (μ, L L T + Ψ) (4) where x ∈ R n × 1 is a vector of spike counts across the n simultaneously-recorded neurons, μ ∈ R n × 1 is a vector of mean spike counts, L ∈ R n × m is the loading matrix relating m latent variables to the neural activity, and Ψ ∈ R n × n is a diagonal matrix of independent variances for each neuron. The model parameters μ, L, and Ψ were estimated using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm [60]. As shown in Fig 1A, FA separates the spike count covariance into a shared component, LLT, and an independent component, Ψ. The rank, m, of LLT indicates the number of latent variables needed to describe the shared covariance. If m equals one, then the shared covariance exists on a line. If m equals two, then the shared covariance exists on a plane, and so on. To determine m, we applied FA to the spike counts and selected the value for m that maximized the cross-validated data-likelihood. In this study, we used two key metrics derived from the shared covariance matrix to describe population activity: shared dimensionality (dshared) and percent shared variance. First, we sought to measure the number of dimensions in the shared covariance as a metric for the complexity of the population activity. We followed a two step procedure to obtain this metric. We first found the m that maximized the cross-validated data likelihood, as is standard practice. We then defined dshared as the number of dimensions that were needed to explain 95% of the shared covariance, LLT. We did this for the following reasons. In simulations, we found that, when training data were abundant, there was not a strong effect of overfitting and the cross-validated data likelihood curve saturated at large dimensionalities. As a result, the peak data-likelihood appeared at widely varying dimensionalities along the flat portion of the curve, leading to variability in the value of m from one run to the next. In contrast, we found that defining dshared as described above provided a more reliable estimate of dimensionality across analyses, even if it may have been slightly smaller than the true dimensionality. Second, we measured the amount of each neuron’s variance that was shared with at least one other neuron in the recorded population (Fig 1C). Mathematically, percent shared variance for the kth neuron was computed as: Percent shared variance for neuron k = L k L k T L k L k T + Ψ k (5) where Lk is the kth row of the factor loading matrix and Ψk is the independent variance for the kth neuron. The values reported in this paper (see Figs 3,5, 6 and 7B) represent averages over all neurons included in a given analysis. For Figs 1B, 4A, 8C and 8D, we computed a separate metric, the percent of overall shared variance explained by each mode. This was used to quantify the relative dominance of each mode for explaining shared variability. The percent of shared variance explained by the ith mode was computed as: % ofsharedvarianceexplainedbymodei = λ i ∑ j = 1 m λ j (6) where λi is the eigenvalue of LLT corresponding to the ith mode and m is the rank of L. Note that this metric does not take into account the independent variances. Throughout this work, modes are referred to as “dominant” if they explain a large percentage of shared variance. In Figs 4C, 9C and 9D, we partitioned the percent shared variance (Eq 5) along each mode. We computed percent shared variance along the ith mode for the kth neuron as: % sharedvarianceformodei and neuron k = λ i u i k 2 L k L k T + Ψ k (7) where uik is the kth entry in the ith eigenvector of LLT. We then averaged this value across all neurons. This allowed us to break down the contribution of each mode to percent shared variance and illustrated a contrast between the clustered and non-clustered network models. Note that Eq 5 is equivalent to summing Eq 7 over all i. A central goal of this study was to determine how dshared and percent shared variance vary with neuron and trial counts for in vivo recordings and spiking network models. To study these trends with changes in neuron count, we sampled increasing numbers of neurons from either the V1 recordings or the network simulations. FA was then applied to the selected neurons to obtain dshared and percent shared variance. To increase the neuron counts, we augmented the next smaller sample of neurons with additional randomly selected neurons. For example, we first randomly selected 10 neurons, computed dshared and percent shared variance for this set, and then added 10 additional randomly-selected neurons to obtain a new sample of neurons. For the in vivo recordings we repeated this procedure for each of three arrays, using 1200 trials for each neuron count. For the model networks, we repeated this procedure 25 times at each neuron count using 5 non-overlapping sets of neurons and 5 non-overlapping sets of trials, using either 1200 or 10,000 trials for each neuron count. All neuron samples were obtained exclusively from the excitatory populations in the two networks. Since inhibitory neurons in both model networks did not have clustering structure, exclusion of this population allowed us to isolate the impact of clustering on the observed trends. We studied how dshared and percent shared variance change with trial count by performing the same procedure as described above, except that trials were increased rather than neurons. For in vivo recordings, we repeated this procedure once for each of three arrays with the same 80 neuron sampled in all trial counts. In the model networks 25 analyses were run with 5 non-overlapping sets of 80 neurons and 5 non-overlapping sets of trials for each trial count. We sought to assess how the identified modes of shared variance change with increasing neuron count. We could do this by measuring the angles between corresponding modes; however as neuron count increases, modes can change order, causing direct angle measurements between modes with the same index to overestimate the difference between the two sets of modes. To overcome this, we measured principal angles between sets of modes [61]. We first identified the modes of shared variability as the eigenvectors of the shared covariance matrix LLT. We then computed the principal angles between modes from two different conditions (i. e. , different numbers of neurons). Since the vector defining each mode had length equal to the number of neurons in the sample, we could not directly measure the principal angle between the eigenvectors of conditions with different neuron counts. To overcome this, we first computed LLT in each condition using only the rows of L that correspond to a set of 20 neurons common across the 20-, 40-, 80-, and 500-neuron sets studied. Once we computed the reduced LLT in each condition, we then measured the angle between the modes as described above. Additionally, to restrict the analysis to the most dominant modes, only the five modes explaining the largest amount of shared variance were included in all principal angle measurements. To study how the choice of sampled neurons influences dshared and percent shared variance, we sampled excitatory neurons from the clustered network by varying the number of clusters represented in a set of 50 neurons sampled. This was done by first randomly selecting N clusters from the total of 50 clusters in the network. Next, 50/N excitatory neurons were selected at random from each of the chosen clusters. The variable N was selected so that 50/N resulted in an integer value. FA was applied to 10,000 trials from the 50 selected neurons. The procedure was repeated 25 times with 5 non-overlapping sets of neurons and 5 non-overlapping sets of trials.
We seek to understand how billions of neurons in the brain work together to give rise to everyday brain function. In most current experimental settings, we can only record from tens of neurons for a few hours at a time. A major question in systems neuroscience is whether our interpretation of how neurons interact would change if we monitor orders of magnitude more neurons and for substantially more time. In this study, we use realistic networks of model neurons, which allow us to analyze the activity from as many model neurons as we want for as long as we want. For these models, we found that we can identify the salient interactions among neurons and interpret their activity meaningfully within the range of neurons and recording time available in current experiments. Furthermore, we studied how the neural activity from the models reflects how the neurons are connected. These results help to guide the interpretation of analyses using populations of neurons in the context of the larger network to understand brain function.
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Scaling Properties of Dimensionality Reduction for Neural Populations and Network Models