A measure of local variation of inter-spike intervals.

It has been revealed in our recent study that cortical neurons are categorized into distinct types, according to a new measure of the local variation of inter-spike intervals, L(V). In this paper, we obtain values of the local variation L(V) and a conventional coefficient of variation C(V) for a variety of model point processes. While the value of C(V) undergoes large changes by rate fluctuation of the point processes, the value of L(V) does not undergo large changes by rate fluctuation, and is principally determined by the form of intrinsic interval distribution of the original model point process.