Beyond correlation analysis: mutual information

Last time, I mentioned a website which gives an overview of methods to analyze neuronal (and other) networks. Let’s have a closer look. Here’s a list of the methods:

  • Cross-correlation (the standard method)
  • Mutual Information
  • Incremental Mutual Information
  • Granger Causality
  • Transfer Entropy
  • Incremental Transfer Entropy
  • Generalized Transfer Entropy
  • Bayesian Inference
  • Anatomical Reconstruction

To be honest, I never heard of most of them. So let’s simply go into it and start with ‘Mutual Information’.

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Posted in Data analysis, Network analysis | 6 Comments

Beyond correlation analysis

There are many papers out that use calcium imaging of a lot (tens to thousands) of neurons in animal brains. When I first encountered these kind of publications (roughly a year ago), it took me some hours to become familiar with the mode of presentation, which was very often a correlation matrix.

Yesterday, I was testing my 2-photon widefield microscope on C. elegans with nuclear GCamp5-labeled neurons. So I had the opportunity to do this kind of analysis on my own. Note that 1) I don’t know very much about these neurons 2) I don’t care really much; I’m more interested in the ways of analyzing this kind of data. Continue reading

Posted in Calcium Imaging, Data analysis, Neuronal activity | 2 Comments