A Comparison Study of Point-Process Filter and Deep Learning Performance in Estimating Rat Position Using an Ensemble of Place Cells

The emergence of deep learning techniques has provided new tools for the analysis of complex data in the field of neuroscience. In parallel, advanced statistical approaches like point-process modeling provide powerful tools for analyzing the spiking activity of neural populations. How statistical and machine learning techniques compare when applied to neural data remains largely unclear. In this research, we compare the performance of a point-process filter and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network in decoding the 2D movement trajectory of a rat using the neural activity recorded from an ensemble of hippocampal place cells. We compute the least absolute error (LAE), a measure of accuracy of prediction, and the coefficient of determination (R2), a measure of prediction consistency, to compare the performance of these two methods. We show that the LSTM and point-process filter provide comparable accuracy in predicting the position; however, the point-process provides further information about the prediction which is unavailable for LSTM. Though previous results report better performance using deep learning techniques, our results indicate that this is not universally the case. We also investigate how these techniques encode information carried by place cell activity and compare the computational efficiency of the two methods. While the point-process model is built using the receptive field for each place cell, we show that LSTM does not necessarily encode receptive fields, but instead decodes the movement trajectory using other features of neural activity. Although it is less robust, LSTM runs more than 7 times faster than the fastest point-process filter in this research, providing a strong advantage in computational efficiency. Together, these results suggest that the point-process filters and LSTM approaches each provide distinct advantages; the choice of model should be informed by the specific scientific question of interest.