Description

Understanding how a neuron works has been a major goal in neuroscience. Neuron modeling using the leaky integrate-and-fire model is widely used but the choice of threshold is not well-established. We give theoretical arguments on why the input of each biological neuron can be approximated by a (compound) Poisson process and hence the integration of its input would result in a filtered (compound) Poisson process. We find that adding a refractory period does not hurt the convergence to a Poisson process and that the quantal synaptic failures help the convergence. Under the Poisson-arrival assumption, we study source of timing jitter in the neuron which enables us to determine neural thresholding functions that are optimal in certain interesting senses. With the derived threshold functions, we treat the neuron as a communication channel for which information-theoretic quantities can be calculated. In particular, we numerically evaluate the optimal input-intensity distribution along with the capacity of the neuron using the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm. Simple formulas which approximate the capacity-achieving input distribution are given. Furthermore, the Jimbo-Kunisawa algorithm is used to explore energy-efficient operating points for neuron. Finally, a rate matching argument leads to a unique operating point which turns out to agree with experimentally observed rate.