AUTHOR=Xu Zishen , Wu Wei , Winter Shawn S. , Mehlman Max L. , Butler William N. , Simmons Christine M. , Harvey Ryan E. , Berkowitz Laura E. , Chen Yang , Taube Jeffrey S. , Wilber Aaron A. , Clark Benjamin J. 

TITLE=A Comparison of Neural Decoding Methods and Population Coding Across Thalamo-Cortical Head Direction Cells

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neural Circuits

VOLUME=13

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neural-circuits/articles/10.3389/fncir.2019.00075

DOI=10.3389/fncir.2019.00075

ISSN=1662-5110

ABSTRACT=<p>Head direction (HD) cells, which fire action potentials whenever an animal points its head in a particular direction, are thought to subserve the animal’s sense of spatial orientation. HD cells are found prominently in several thalamo-cortical regions including anterior thalamic nuclei, postsubiculum, medial entorhinal cortex, parasubiculum, and the parietal cortex. While a number of methods in neural decoding have been developed to assess the dynamics of spatial signals within thalamo-cortical regions, studies conducting a quantitative comparison of machine learning and statistical model-based decoding methods on HD cell activity are currently lacking. Here, we compare statistical model-based and machine learning approaches by assessing decoding accuracy and evaluate variables that contribute to population coding across thalamo-cortical HD cells.</p>