Variational Information Maximization for Neural Coding

Abstract

Mutual Information (MI) is a long studied measure of coding efficiency, and many attempts to apply it to population coding have been made. However, this is a computationally intractable task, and most previous studies redefine the criterion in forms of approximations. Recently we described properties of a simple lower bound on MI [2]. Here we describe the bound optimization procedure for learning of population codes in a simple point neural model. We compare our approach with other techniques maximizing approximations of MI, focusing on a comparison with the Fisher Information criterion.