LETTER Communicated by Robbe Goris Dethroning the Fano Factor: A Flexible, Model-Based Approach to Partitioning Neural Variability Adam S. Charles
[email protected] Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A. Mijung Park
[email protected] Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London W1T 4JG, U.K. J. Patrick Weller
[email protected] Gregory D. Horwitz
[email protected] Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, U.S.A. Jonathan W. Pillow
[email protected] Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, U.S.A. Neurons in many brain areas exhibit high trial-to-trial variability, with spike counts that are overdispersed relative to a Poisson distribution. Recent work (Goris, Movshon, & Simoncelli, 2014) has proposed to explain this variability in terms of a multiplicative interaction between a stochastic gain variable and a stimulus-dependent Poisson firing rate, which produces quadratic relationships between spike count mean and variance. Here we examine this quadratic assumption and propose a more flexible family of models that can account for a more diverse set of mean-variance relationships. Our model contains additive gaussian noise that is transformed nonlinearly to produce a Poisson spike rate. Different choices of the nonlinear function can give rise to qualitatively different mean-variance relationships, ranging from sublinear to linear to quadratic. Intriguingly, a rectified squaring nonlinearity produces a linear mean-variance function, corresponding to responses with a A.S.C. and M.P. share first authorship. Neural Computation 30, 1012–1045 (2018) © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/NECO_a_01062 Dethroning the Fano Factor 1013 constant Fano factor.